


a foolproof guide to success in the modern age

by magicsoul (cherishiskisa)



Series: murderverse [1]
Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: (I PROMISE!!!!!), A Kind Of Slow Burn But Not Really What You'd Expect Or Think, Complicated Relationships, Dark Comedy, Eventual Happy Ending, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Morally Ambiguous Character, New York City, READ THE WARNINGS ON EACH CHAPTER, edited july 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2020-11-25 21:55:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 216,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20919230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherishiskisa/pseuds/magicsoul
Summary: Where there's a will, Kihyun wants to be in it.





	1. Month 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kihyun does his research; a meet-cute; dates one, two, and three; a surprise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome to murderverse!!!!! 
> 
> first and foremost i must thank hyb for the inspiration to write this (a one-sentence message, contextless, that birthed this whole monster!!!!), and for inspiration for everything else in general. endless thanks always to ellie, demon beta from hell and my best friend, for patiently reading every single draft and idea. then to roux and izzy and katya for reading and enjoying and screaming with me as i kept working!!! 
> 
> several warnings going into this: this is not, at first, a happy story. kihyun is not a good person. i know this, and so does he! **this chapter has mentions of gun violence, suicide, and multiple other murder methods. most of this story will have at least mentions of all of those things going forward. if that is too much for you, i highly recommend not reading this !!! **also disclaimer that changkyun IS my ult and im very mean to him in this but i promise i love him so much :( the opinions of the kihyun do not reflect the opinions of the author. well at least not all of the time hehehe.
> 
> **minor edits have been made to this story since i published it; i rewrote the first part of month 1, and made changes to later chapters accordingly!**
> 
> more links at the end, but [here’s the official playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/12MLmAfM9PhFB63N7EWMww?si=ipg0IFJgRG6kXN_z6qalMw)! without further ado -- 

“You know, none of my other clients ever want to review the terms of their will more than once.”

Changkyun shrugs, smiling and fiddling with a corner of the paper. It’s warm in Tamsin’s office and he’d rather be at home, but this won’t take long — it never does.

“And none of them _ever_ want to start as early as you did. This is our… fifth meeting to discuss this? Since you were fifteen?”

Morbid teenagers grow into morbid adults. Changkyun doesn’t know why Tamsin is so surprised, considering as the family-lawyer-on-retainer she’s known him for much longer than most people in his life and has therefore seen exactly what he’s like as a person, but given the lack of self-awareness among the ultra-rich more generally, it does make sense that his peers (in class, if not in age) would be reluctant to confront their own deaths, inevitable though they may be. Changkyun’s never felt like he’s had that kind of luxury, despite the fact that he’s had just about every other possible luxury imaginable.

“I think a conversation every three years isn’t that unreasonable,” he says with another shrug. “But I won’t take up too much of your time. Here’s what I’ve got.” 

He slides the paper over the desk to her and she adjusts her reading glasses on her nose, leaning in to read it. This new version of the will is very similar to the past few versions, with only a couple of small but notable differences. Some new charities named to receive a certain percentage of his holdings, one or two stricken from the list, distant cousins who’d recently made themselves known adjusted for. The lion’s share, of course, going to Kihyun.

“You’re right, it’s not that different,” Tamsin says, opening the file she has on Changkyun — hilariously huge, and he wonders what else is in there, beyond the few college misdemeanors and ill-advised attempts to acquisition social media start-ups — to find the previous iteration of the will. “I feel like we went over this pretty recently, didn’t we? With your husband?”

Kihyun had been so formal going into that meeting, so nervous. The concept of a family lawyer inexplicably scared him, but Changkyun had assured him that Tamsin was very nice, always summered in the Adirondacks with her Basset hound, and was generally harmless. Picturing strait-laced Tamsin chasing through the mountains after a short-legged floppy-eared dog put Kihyun’s mind at ease fairly quickly, and the conversation went well. 

“Yes, but I changed it since then,” Changkyun says, patiently. Again, he thinks to himself that he wants to go home. It was so hard to leave Kihyun this morning, warm and pliant in their bed, accepting Changkyun’s offer to bring breakfast back from the city and then rolling over to go back to sleep. Changkyun had watched the shiver and settle of his bare shoulders and then leaned down to kiss him right on the curve of his neck, and Kihyun had made a soft, yielding noise and let Changkyun roll him onto his back again so they could kiss. He’s probably still in bed now, and it’s so rare that he lets himself sleep in on weekends, and Changkyun doesn’t want to miss it. “And so long as we have to get it notarized and attested every time, I’m going to have to keep coming in. So. Do you have any questions?”

Tamsin sighs, reading over it again. “I don’t think so, no. You’re not going to support Constance’s art gallery anymore?”

“You didn’t hear about that? It was all some money-laundering thing,” Changkyun says, waving a vague hand. He himself barely heard about it, but it doesn’t take much to make him want to write someone into or out of his will. “Shady business. Too many secrets.”

“Everyone has secrets,” Tamsin says with the kind of wisdom possessed only by lawyers of a certain age. She’s so funny, Tamsin. Sometimes she’s so polite and cold that it’s like they’ve never met before, but other times she insists on giving Changkyun advice that’s far less jurisprudential than it is auntly. “You remember what happened with your third cousin. And look how much you’re leaving to _him_. I mean, doesn’t your husband have any secrets from you?”

Changkyun thinks of the way Kihyun had held onto him this morning, in the thirty seconds between Changkyun waking up and his alarm going off. Kihyun always holds onto him very tightly when he sleeps and denies it the next day, his hands curled around Changkyun’s arm or waist or wherever he can reach him. And today, he’d stayed just as close even after the alarm had sounded, not wanting Changkyun to leave. Changkyun wants to go home.

“Of course not,” Changkyun says. “Why would he?”

***

_some time earlier_

_MONTH 1_

“I can’t live like this,” Kihyun says, out loud.

In the nearly two years since he’d first moved into this apartment, he’s thought that to himself nearly every day, but he’s never said it out loud before. But finally it’s time to acknowledge it. Finally it’s time to make a change.

He can’t live like this — who _could _live like this? He does his best to keep it clean, to keep it livable, but if it’s not livable in the first place, not even Kihyun’s tense obsession with organization and ergonomics could salvage it. It’s worse than a shoebox, and he doesn’t even own enough shoes to merit calling it a shoebox at all, really. 300 square feet. The rent is $2,000 a month, and he’s right next door to a laundromat that rattles and clanks at all hours of the day, because his life is a joke with no punchline. And his apartment is the size of two parking spaces. It’s pathetic.

“I can’t live like this,” he says again, just to make sure. The kitchen is clean and his bed is made, but his neighbor to the left plays CNN until three in the morning at top volume, and his neighbor to the right lets pigeons roost on the fire escape. Even the fucking pigeons are happier here than Kihyun is.

So what can he do? Ostensibly, he’s doing everything right. Good job, steady job. Two blocks away from his miserable hell-hole of a home, and his coworkers none the wiser as to the leaky roof over Kihyun’s head. He’d worked his way up from underpaid intern to underpaid assistant to somewhat underpaid full-time employee and now to decently-paid manager, doesn’t eat beyond his means, doesn’t dress better than he has to. He saves money fastidiously and only goes out with friends when they’re in town. Dislikes the modern state of theatre and so doesn’t waste any time or finances on Broadway nonsense. He’s doing everything right. He should be comfortable. And yet he’s literally anything _but _comfortable. The system that should have rewarded him for his hard work and dedication is leaving him stuck in a fucking deathtrap of a Chelsea studio apartment, and he doesn’t know how to get out.

But if he can put a name to his problem, he can fix it. That’s never not worked before. His problem? He can’t live like this anymore. Lower-middle-class has never fucking been good enough. As to the solution, well. He’s working on it. Robbing a bank is out of the question. Not much embezzlement to be done in his line of work, either. He’s never been the creative type, so there are no secret genius startup ideas hidden up his sleeve. No trust fund to dig into. No nest egg to hatch prematurely. On his own, he has nothing. Which tells him that whatever needs to happen to break him out of this dismal existence, it’s going to have to come from the outside.

Alas, he doesn’t know any multibillionaires who could help him out, so he goes to bed hungry and dissatisfied. In the morning it hasn’t gone away; he wakes up feeling the same, even after his ascetic breakfast and pedestrian commute. There’s a new batch of interns to be trained, fresh out of college and giggling, their palms sticky when they shake Kihyun’s hand, and the headache throbbing behind Kihyun’s left temple worsens and worsens. When will this end? When, and how? He ruminates on this as he eats lunch at his desk, even though he could hear the rest of the team laughing and chatting on their way out to spend the company’s money at Panera or something equally disgusting. To add insult to injury, the office kettle is broken, and Kihyun, infuriated and appalled at everything going wrong in his life, takes his scarf and coat on a walk to a nearby café that’s typically too pretentious even for him, but when he’s in this kind of mood, it’s almost comforting to be surrounded by the coddled nouveau-riche. He resents them for the ease with which they move through life — _they _all have trust funds. As he sits by the window with his joyless fig and brie sandwich in one hand and his unsweetened English breakfast tea in the other, he amuses himself with the expression that would flit across the face of any of these idiots were Kihyun to come up, introduce himself, and say, simply, _pay me to be less miserable. _

What, is he going to develop a gambling addiction, bet the house on the ponies, waste away watching the lottery numbers get called? No. He finishes his sorry excuse for a lunch and gets up to leave, and he’d been in a neutral-negative mood — typical — but by the time he makes it back to his desk, he’s privately seething again, because on his way out of the café someone had unintentionally shoulder-checked him and Kihyun had instinctively snarled “Watch where you’re fucking going,” and the motherfucker hadn’t even had the decency to apologize. Granted, Kihyun hadn’t stuck around to see if an apology had been forthcoming, but it was back to the drawing board for him, back to work, because it’s all fine and good to have immediately identified his crisis, but he can’t strike yet, the iron isn’t hot. He’s all pent-up urgency, no way to let it out safely, he’s going stir-crazy in his own head. He snaps at the interns, but buys them muffins so they don’t complain to HR about him. Everything is so fucking irritating; everything happens so slowly. Why can’t Kihyun wake up in a world that cares for him? For which he cares in return? No, instead, he has to go to this stupid fucking job and then, when the workday is over, back to his miserable little hovel, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Once he’s back at his apartment, he takes a quick shower, heats himself a quick dinner, and stews in his own dissatisfaction. It’s been such a shitty day. Just as he has that thought, there is an ominous _thunk _from the direction of his radiator, and then an even more ominous silence as it shuts itself off. Fucking great. He needs a new place to live — he needs a better job, or to be so rich as to not need employment at all — he needs a better life, period. He deserves it. Not everyone would agree, maybe, and he certainly can’t complain to Minhyuk about this (“What did you expect? It’s Manhattan!”), or any of his other friends, for that matter, so who could possibly agree with him? That needs to be the first step: finding someone who will agree that Kihyun’s circumstances are dire and need immediate changing. 

And just like that, Kihyun knows what to do. Sitting there on his mattress from IKEA and eating lukewarm pad thai leftovers, he knows what he has to do. It’s not a new idea, and as far as get-rich-quick schemes go, it’s not the simplest or the most risk-free, but it’s one he’s confident he can pull off. He’ll succeed where everyone else has failed. He’s been thinking about it for a while.

It all began several years ago when Kihyun’s friend Wonho got married: a whirlwind two-month romance led to an equally whirlwind engagement, and finally an intimate, beautiful wedding and a honeymoon in the Maldives. Wonho had never made an effort to disguise his interest in richer, older men, and he’d finally nabbed one — early 40s, tenured university professor, big house, big cock. The love in the newlyweds’ eyes as they gazed at each other across the altar had been almost too much to bear, and Kihyun couldn’t help but think that with Wonho’s looks, with the way he’s always drawn men and women to himself like flies to honey, could have gone his whole life without working a single job if he’d just leaned into his irresistibility a touch more, he’d dreamed a little small.

Kihyun doesn’t have Wonho’s looks. He’s short, angular, an acquired taste, not like Wonho and his frankly ridiculous voluptuous curves and babyface. But Kihyun has (no offense to Wonho) a pretty damn powerful intellect. He has no qualms about lying, either, never has and never will, so if anyone’s going to be able to fake his way through entrapping a rich man into marriage and then murdering him to collect the inheritance as soon as both names are signed on the line, it’ll be Kihyun Yoo.

Can’t dream too small. Can’t aim too high. Life is all about balance. He’ll start tonight — narrow down his options. New York City is stuffed to the brim with wealth; one out of every nine residents has a net worth between 1 and 30 million dollars, and apparently, there are 8,865 lucky bastards on this stupid island worth more than 30 million each. Kihyun’s not as picky as he sounds. He’ll settle for a simple millionaire if he has to, but he’d prefer a little more than that, if possible. And it seems like it will be, given those stats and Kihyun’s abilities.

Kihyun finishes his leftovers and settles on his couch (if two cushions pushed together on the ricketiest wooden frame the world has ever seen can truly be called a couch) with his laptop to begin. If the wifi decides not to work, he’ll walk to the nearest internet cafe, which closes at ten. Forbes kindly maintains a list of the wealthiest people in America, which Kihyun filters by state — he’d rather not travel, he doesn’t have the savings to leave his job — to New York, then realizes no one would even let him be in the same room as a billionaire and so he may as well cut that thought off now before he gets carried away. 

40 under 40 is a better bet; he scrolls through two separate lists before getting bored of all these bright-eyed entrepreneurs who only rake in $8 million a year. Instead, he finds some New York Times articles about the nouveau-riche of Manhattan and reads those for a while, tapping his fingers against the side of his laptop as he does so, as though that’ll make any difference in how fast it’ll run. 

Business Insider is next, but ends up being, for the most part, useless. A horrible selection. He’d expected a cornucopia of wealth and gotten a drugstore clearance section instead. Too old. Too married. Too _young _— who put a child on this list? He doesn’t count as a business mogul if he hasn’t finished _middle school_. But even with Kihyun’s fairly narrow search criteria, he’s getting a decent list of names together, even though he’s six years back in 40 under 40 and the net worths are only getting smaller, which is concerning. He’ll try 30 under 30 instead. Maybe this would be easier for Kihyun if he were to broaden his horizons to include the over-65 set; sure, none of those fossils are likely to be gay or bi, barring a few repressed creeps, but Kihyun won’t appeal to those, he can’t be the bendy jailbait twink they’re looking for. No, Kihyun needs a peer. Someone from his generation, someone who won’t call him a beggar or ungrateful for not contenting himself with his current mediocrity. Someone with more similarities to Kihyun than differences; they need to find a common tongue. Kihyun has expensive taste, surely he’ll be able to blend in with this set. It’s just a matter of finding the one with whom he’ll be able to blend in the _most._

His phone buzzes to let him know it’s time for him to brush his teeth and get ready for bed — early meeting tomorrow, when _doesn’t_ he have an early-morning meeting, he’s so sick of this — and his laptop battery is starting to die. He gets up to plug it in, but, despite not being much of a believer in signs, takes this as a sign that he should stop for the night before he expends too much energy on this. After all, right now he’s feeling bruised and impulsive, but this plan, if he’s going to pull it off, is going to take some time. He has a little list going, hand-written on the back of his receipt from that coffee shop from earlier today: Andrew Tie, Micah Fasone, Changkyun Im, Leo Crawford, Kevin Chen, Loek Janssen. It’s enough, for a start.

Some part of him was hoping that in the morning he’d have changed his mind, but alas, he’s more determined than ever, if anything, especially after his radiator had roared back to life with a vengeance in the middle of the night and kept him sweaty and half-awake through all the small hours. Minuscule breakfast, work, bland lunch at his desk, work, walk home, leftovers for dinner, it’s a classic routine, but today he’s more excited to go home at 5 o’clock than he’s ever been. He has a millionaire to track down, a life to win. He sets up camp on his couch again, same leftovers, laptop plugged in preemptively this time, and gets right back down to work.

His earlier list seems painfully small now, but he finds another few names to add in some 30 under 30 lists. Names, net worths, that’s all fine, but he needs more, he needs some meat, to be able to find the perfect match. He remembers that rich people are fond of various exclusive gala-type events, which are always reported upon by society gossip columns and blogs, so that’s where he looks next. The tone they’re written in starts giving him a headache just behind his right temple, but he perseveres for as long as he can, adding names, making little checkmarks adjacent to his list when he sees a name repeated somewhere, having the occasional sip of ice water, relieving his headache by switching to another article about the young millionaires of Tribeca, and now his list of 6 is a list of 12: Andrew, Micah, Changkyun, Leo, Kevin, Loek, Raghav, Conrad, Eric, Mauricio, Artur, Jonas. 

Just when he’s about to grit his teeth and return to the society columns, there’s his alarm again, and he fights the urge to silence it. He’ll be no good to his prospective mark if he tracks him down with bags under his eyes and shaky underslept hands. He has to stay hydrated, well-rested, hale and normal and approximately functional. Or, depending on which one he chooses, waifish and in need of immediate assistance. Kihyun frowns, closing his laptop for the night. He’ll need to choose soon, and adjust accordingly, make himself as irresistible as possible. Before he sleeps, he looks at the list of names once more, and wonders which one it will be, how best to get him, how best to kill him afterwards. 

_Maybe I should try including women, _he muses at his desk, tomorrow. Aren’t gay best friends trendy these days? He could offer fashion advice, or whatever it is that a gay best friend is supposed to provide. Maybe a woman could be a stepping-stone, keep him dressed well and well-fed, and introduce him to one of her rich queer friends, and then Kihyun will steal her kingdom and leave her in the dust. It’s not a bad amendment to his original idea, and once again he’s raring to leave the office, can barely get out of the door fast enough, and it’s straight back to his laptop, his list, the gossip columns, with women included this time. 

None of these women, however, look like they’d be in the market for a GBF, especially a middle-class grump without a fabulous Birkin bag to call his own already, and women have stronger bullshit detectors, anyway. It would never work. Kihyun realizes he’s wasted the last hour of searching, and, disheartened, stares at his list as though the paper itself has wronged him. Fine, fuck. Back to the society columns, the gala photographs. With the women’s names scratched out, it’s the same names over and over and over again, and he’s getting bored. Suffers through a painfully twee article about a charity ball, where by now, he recognizes these millionaires as old, tiresome acquaintances. Andrew, Micah, Leo, Kevin, Loek, Raghav, Conrad, Eric, Mauricio, Artur, Jonas. Honestly, he _hates _all of these options, all of these faces he’s seeing in the photos from galas and society events, bleary-eyed from alcohol, round-cheeked from too much good living, cocky and brainless and popular, not a single hairline that isn’t receding. Andrew, Micah, Leo, Kevin, Loek, Raghav, Conrad, Eric, Mauricio, Artur, Jonas. Don’t they have anything better to do than go to these events, weekend after weekend after weekend? Kihyun can’t imagine himself getting along with a single one of these vapid socialites, even if it is only pretend. His alarm rings, time for bed, but he shuts it off and flips his phone face-down, determined out of spite to find _the one _tonight. Sure, none of these options are _ideal, _but he can make it work, surely. He clicks on another article. He’s back three years in galas. And here they all are: Andrew, Micah, Leo, Kevin, Loek, Raghav —

There is a name missing.

Kihyun doesn’t know how he didn’t notice that before. He can blame it on his single-minded drive to find a sucker to sap, but sure enough, he’s gone over his initial list a dozen times and left multiple checks by each name to indicate having appeared in both his first night’s searches and a gossip column, but one name is devoid of any accessory. Changkyun Im. That’s interesting; Kihyun thinks he might have been in a 30 under 30. He googles _changkyun im, _not hoping for much, and the first thing he sees is _KB Pharmaceuticals_; the next thing, _orphan. _The third thing he sees after that is _200 million dollar fortune._

“Oh,” Kihyun breathes. “Hello.”

Kihyun’s hunch was right, Changkyun Im was on Crain’s New York 30 under 30 in 2015. He’s Korean, like Kihyun. Filthy rich, unlike Kihyun. KB Pharmaceuticals seems to be his parents’ company, but his parents died and now the company is Changkyun’s. At one point, KB Pharmaceuticals represented a new wave of Korean business in America, and now they’re modest, settled, but not passé. Kihyun likes the look of this. Sits up a little straighter, pulls his laptop closer to himself to better see the screen. Changkyun Im. That could be something.

Changkyun Im has made himself rather a hermit, as though doing so on purpose — there’s barely anything about him online. Doesn’t go to society events, keeps his private life fairly private, hosts no festivities, does no interviews. Needless to say, no social media. Not even any scandals splashed across the local gossip websites. Fewer weaknesses to exploit, but this is interesting, this is good, he’s not vapid like the others, he’s tried to stay away from that kind of scene. He’s tried to keep himself isolated. That kind of intentional, deliberate isolation speaks to concealment, the privacy of his private life especially. Not even a single girlfriend talking about him in the New York Post? He’s some kind of gay, for sure, but Kihyun needs more proof, more meat, and so tries searching Korean news sites instead and finds some more information: the parents died in 2013 in a plane crash, how trite, Changkyun is on the board but not CEO or CFO or even COO, the company is smaller than some but certainly nothing to scoff at. He has full access to the inheritance he received upon his parents’ death, and he went to Columbia.

In the photo that accompanies the annoyingly brief blurb in his 30 under 30 profile, Changkyun is unsmiling and ironic, looking at the camera with an expression that seems to indicate that he thinks he’s too cool to be on this list. Kihyun looks up _changkyun im columbia _next and finds, finally, _something_, a scrap of something, a mention of his name in an article about English BAs presenting their work at an open mic on campus. English major. Young orphaned heir. Sensitive, touchy, emotional, unpredictable. Easily influenced. A virgin. Kihyun can tell just by looking at his face. That $200 million is _very _nice. No parents to interfere with a hasty marriage, and his company’s offices are in the Bank of America Tower — an 11-minute F-train ride from Kihyun’s office. 

Kihyun recognizes him. He knows. He’s perfect for Kihyun’s purposes. This is the one. 

Tomorrow Kihyun will go to the library and find some magazines about KB Pharmaceuticals, about Changkyun Im. It seems he consented to be profiled in some business publication several years ago, but the articles aren’t available online. Other than that, Kihyun will stop here for the night. He moves Changkyun Im to the top of his list and goes to bed. 

In the morning he’s still thinking about him. Dark-haired big-nosed Changkyun, sitting on his riches and doing absolutely nothing with them. He’s younger than Kihyun by two years and two months; he was born in Boston, for some reason. Kihyun’s looking over the same three webpages as he walks to work, neatly side-stepping other pedestrians in his way even as he keeps his eyes fixed on his phone. He’ll go to the library at lunch, but until then, he has murder to daydream about over his morning meeting. Par for the course by this point. At least this time he has a target in mind.

The articles, the interviews, are disappointingly useless. Kihyun knows by now never to rely on anyone but himself, so he doesn’t even know why he bothered getting his hopes up that the key to figuring Changkyun out would be in one of these. He’ll have to stake him out himself. Part of him always knew that he’d have to do that, and although Kihyun’s never been one to shy away from hard work, he hardly even knows where to start. 

He checks the magazines out, makes photocopies of the relevant sections at his office, returns the magazines the next day. The photocopies and his tentative notes go into an old Moleskine he tracked down amidst his pitiful selection of books, but he’s being as vague as possible in his descriptions. Then he starts to make a timeline. Keeps it just as vague as the rest of his notes, and breaks it up month by month. Hacks into Hyungwon’s Amazon Prime account (read: texts Minhyuk to ask what the password is) so he can watch _Gone Girl _and get inspired. He’s never killed anyone before, of course — he’s never so much as gotten a speeding ticket — but it just seems like it’d be easy, so long as he’s smart about it. And he will be. 

How to do the deed, that’s the next question. Poison is out; that leaves traces. Same with suffocation, unfortunately. Kihyun’s not usually one to think that he was born in the wrong generation, but when he considers how easy it was to get away with a crime in the 1800s, he can’t help but feel that way. Nowadays forensics are just too advanced for him to be able to do a sloppy job of this. Cut the brakes on his car — no, too obvious, too much could go wrong, what if someone sees him doing it? Kihyun reads about unsolved murders for days on end. The issue with so many of these ideas — shoving him into the Hudson, abandoning him in the woods to freeze to death and only be found when the snow thaws in spring — is the length of time between the death and the discovery. Kihyun doesn’t want to have that kind of time. He wants him dead, and he wants money in the bank. Step one, step two. That’s it. A carbon monoxide or gas leak would be easy enough to trigger, but there are too many moving parts, especially since Kihyun would have to be out of the house in order to avoid becoming a casualty himself, and if he’s not there, there’d be no one to supervise that everything was on-track. Maybe Kihyun should get a gun. He investigates that, too.

He’s getting ahead of himself. He hasn’t even seen Changkyun in person yet. The photograph from the 30 under 30 list is taped into the inside front cover of Kihyun’s Moleskine. Once they meet, he’ll burn the whole notebook, of course, but it’s coming in handy for now, having all his notes in one place. Maybe Kihyun could push him out of a window. Stage a suicide. It’ll all depend on how it goes once they meet. 

Which has to be soon. One of Kihyun’s windows is starting to leak around the edges, the aged insulation wearing thin. He can’t live like this, he can’t. Changkyun’s going to help him. It’ll be so simple — meet him, woo him, get hitched, merge finances, pull the metaphorical trigger. Or literal. Kihyun can get a gun from a private seller anonymously, without a license. He’s still considering it, and that would be a less violent option, an easy way to get the job done. But maintaining anonymity, pinning it on someone else, that’s the tricky part.

He’ll figure it out later. It’ll depend on what Changkyun is like, what Changkyun likes. It’s now been two weeks since Kihyun remembered this plan he’d brewed at Wonho’s wedding and been keeping in his pocket ever since then, which is long enough. It’s time. 

Kihyun takes the day off work. There’s a Whole Foods across the street from the Bank of America Tower on one side, and a Starbucks on the other. Getting a window seat at Starbucks for the whole day seems impossible, so Kihyun goes to Whole Foods instead. It’s eight in the morning and he buys a stale croissant from the bakery section to preclude nosy employees from asking him not to loiter, then settles down for the day. Whole Foods, in an attempt to be a cool, chill grocery store and not the sock puppet of a bloated corporation, has set up a seating area/café by the exit, and Kihyun claims a seat with the perfect view of the entrance to the tower. And waits.

Talk about a needle in a haystack. Not only is this a very touristy part of town — _disgusting_, Kihyun thinks to himself — but it’s also a wealthy one, so he has quite a few false alarms amidst all the neck-craning and eye-straining. Any time he sees a black-haired guy in a suit he gets all excited, but it’s never him. Maybe he’s changed his hair: Kihyun broadens his search to any young-looking Asian man exiting a blacked-out car or taxi. Maybe he doesn’t show up to work at all. English major inheriting a pharmaceutical company — probably hasn’t come to work in months, maybe years. Filthy rich heirs never have to come to the office, after all. Kihyun sits there, chewing on his rubbery croissant, and resents him, unseen.

Nine o’clock passes. Then ten. Kihyun takes a five-minute break to get a sandwich, and when he comes back, there’s a new wave of people coming out of the subway station at 42nd and Bryant Park. Kihyun takes a seat, watches a woman in a bright yellow coat leading her child across the road, and then— then he sees him. 

He’s shorter than Kihyun expected. His hair is still black, and it’s longer now than it was in the photo, verging on unkempt. Maybe it’s just puffy. He’s wearing jeans with a sport coat — how tacky — and he’s coming out of the subway station. He takes the subway? He’s worth $200 million, and he takes the subway to work, not a hired car? He can definitely afford a chauffeur. A whole fleet of chauffeurs. But he takes the fucking subway. Sure. Why not.

Now Kihyun knows what kind of bitch he is. He likes to slum it. Pretend he’s not a one-percenter. Wear jeans and take the subway. Practically asking to be wedded and murdered, since he must be dying to get all that money off his hands as it is. Kihyun watches his messy black head as he crosses the street without looking both ways and vanishes into the polished depths of the office building. Kihyun’s heart is beating so fast that he can hear the blood pumping through his body, and his hands are cold. 

There he was. The man who’s going to save Kihyun from his dreary, meaningless existence. The hand that pulls the lab rat from the cage. He’s in that building there, right now, and has no idea what’s waiting for him across the street.

Because Kihyun is going to keep waiting. He came in, which means he’s damn well going to come back out sometime. Kihyun’s posture is perfectly straight and his eyes are fixed on the door. He’ll sit there all day if he has to. From deep dives into websites devoted to tracking the stock market, Kihyun has gleaned that KB Pharmaceuticals is in the midst of a merger of sorts, so Changkyun must be needed at meetings, contract negotiations, the like. To continue to keep himself from being accosted by Whole Foods employees, Kihyun puts headphones in and acts like he’s listening to a podcast. But his eyes are still on the building. He wonders what floor Changkyun’s office is on and tips his head up, but he can’t see the top of the tower from this angle.

His knees and back are starting to get stiff, and by one in the afternoon he’s tired and irritable and snaps “Excuse you” at a woman talking loudly on her phone. Doesn’t Changkyun need lunch? He got to work at twenty-past-ten, is he seriously going to stay there until five like a good boy? Kihyun is minutes away from going in there to get him out himself and demand Changkyun tell him his daily routine (if a— a _wastrel _like that is even capable of having one, Kihyun is so pissed off about having to sit here waiting around for him that he’s getting all Victorian with his insults), what he likes, what he dislikes, how to make him soft in the middle and trusting and weak, weak enough for Kihyun to strike without thinking twice about it. He tries to look up the directory of the businesses in the Bank of America Tower but doesn’t get very far, and, in the end, he doesn’t need to, because here comes Changkyun again. Still wearing that stupid outfit, and now it’s worse because he’s rolled the sleeves of his sport coat up to his elbows. Appalling.

Kihyun’s up off his uncomfortable wooden chair and outside in a flash, buttoning his coat hurriedly around his throat. Isn’t Changkyun cold? It’s April, not August. Kihyun stays on the other side of the street from him and watches him, watches him, as they walk eastward with matching strides.

There’s a moment midway between 5th and Madison, fuck this fucking idiotic tourist-infested city and every asshole who chooses to come here and interfere with Kihyun’s plans, where Kihyun very nearly loses him, caught up in a jumble of noisy visitors and hot dog salesmen, and has to run to catch up — Changkyun is half a block ahead. Where is he going? Alone, and with such purpose? Kihyun is learning very quickly that walking forward while you’re looking to your left is a lot harder than it had seemed. Where the _fuck _is Changkyun going, seriously? There’s nothing around here except overpriced, tacky shopping and Grand Central, and—

Fuck, he’s going to Grand Central.

“Idiot,” Kihyun breathes, both about himself and about Changkyun. He could laugh about this — why is this _imbecile _taking a train from Grand Central when, again, _he could afford to buy several chauffeuring companies _without breaking a sweat — but he doesn’t have time to laugh; he sees Changkyun politely pushing his way through the teeming masses and holding the heavy gilded door open for someone, and then he’s going through, and Kihyun’s going to lose him, he won’t be able to know if Changkyun is catching a train and if so, to where, so he runs, too, runs across the street and dodges three taxis. He’s followed by a disapproving cacophony of honking and he ducks to cover his face, just in case Changkyun turns to see what the fuss is all about. But he doesn’t— and even if he were to, Kihyun wouldn’t have any idea, because when he looks up again, Changkyun is gone.

“Fuck,” Kihyun says emphatically.

He’s in, at least. He looks around frantically but it’s no use, there’s too many people, he can’t see, so he runs up the stairs to the west balcony and leans all his weight on the marble railing and looks for him.

Black hair, black coat, Kihyun spots him like a camera zooming in and tries to catch his breath. Changkyun is almost directly beneath him, patting down his pockets for something and heading towards the door leading to track 24. He’s going to a late-lunch meeting, maybe, or maybe just skipping out for the rest of the day. Kihyun leans further over the railing to watch him go and stares until he can’t see him anymore, until Changkyun has gone down some tunnel to board his train.

There is a light pressure on Kihyun’s elbow and he jerks back with a disgusted hiss only to see a well-meaning ruddy-faced man who looks concerned and idiotic, opening his mouth to ask Kihyun if he’s okay, to tell him to be careful.

“Mind your own business,” Kihyun says crisply, relishing the way his face falls, and takes his leave.

He has no reason to believe Changkyun has a routine. Just look at him — he’s a mess. And yet there’s something scratching at the back of Kihyun’s mind, his intuition telling him to come back again, same time tomorrow. Not in the morning, he can’t afford to take all his sick days at once just to stalk this clown, but at lunch.

Kihyun gives into that scratch. He leaves his office with enough time to account for variations in Changkyun’s schedule and is waiting outside Whole Foods at one on the dot. And here he comes, his witless target, and today he’s in a thick sweater, no coat. He must run warm. Kihyun follows him again, maybe tomorrow he’ll walk behind him instead of across from him, he doubts Changkyun is perceptive enough to notice he’s being tailed, and again Changkyun goes into Grand Central, again he goes to track 24.

And again the next day. Kihyun does follow behind him this time, fifteen paces away. Changkyun is a slow walker and Kihyun’s already tired of restraining himself for Changkyun’s sake — this is going to be a long 18 months. But he thinks of what his life _could _be like instead of how it is, a mansion in New Rochelle, a Rolls Royce in the driveway, peace and quiet and a big kitchen, and forces himself to slow down.

It’s been three days. Three times that Kihyun has followed Changkyun to Grand Central. Safe to say it’s a routine, but Kihyun is apprehensive about letting this rest over the weekend. Today is Thursday — he’ll have to do it tomorrow. Meet him tomorrow. And it _has_ to be a meet-cute. Something memorable, something sweet. Something for Changkyun to reminisce about later. Something to keep him going through the long months of letting Kihyun be chased, then through the wedding and their brief marriage before Kihyun snuffs him out. Kihyun goes home and watches _500 Days of Summer _for inspiration. He hates it, which comes as no surprise.

But at least now he knows what to do. It’s very nearly a sleepless night — how is he meant to sleep knowing his life will change tomorrow? He looks at the photograph of Changkyun on the inside of his Moleskine, wonders if he’s gone insane, closes the Moleskine, takes a shower, and goes to bed.

Everything is planned. Everything is perfect. He bought new shoes after work yesterday just for this — off-white Converse high-tops. It’s an unnecessary detail, but he likes overplanning. It’s better than being up shit creek without a paddle, which is how he’s been his whole life. Up until now. Now, it changes.

He’s waiting in the tunnel leading to track 24 at 1:08. In his hands is a tray of four coffees, bought five minutes before, with the lids on loose. He can see several clocks from where he’s standing and he waits, counts down, and takes deep breaths. Be real. Be human. Be natural, for him. Kihyun doesn’t know exactly what Changkyun likes, but he has a pretty good idea.

1:13. 1:14. He should be here by now — Kihyun’s starting to get nervous. Of course he’d fuck this up for Kihyun. Of _course_. Now Kihyun has to reevaluate, maybe he can figure out a way to get his work to reach out to Changkyun’s, because he’s not letting this one go, he’s come too close, he’s done too much. But he doesn’t leave yet — the latest Changkyun has ever gotten here is 1:16, in the days that Kihyun was observing him. There’s still time. Kihyun glances around, looks up to the top of the tunnel, about to give up hope and leave, but then—

There he is, fuck, there he is. Kihyun starts walking. He walks fast, too fast for how many coffees he’s holding, and Changkyun sees him but sees without looking, clearly elsewhere, and they collide — shoulder to chest — the tray of coffees tumbles down and splashes all over Changkyun’s shirt, all over Kihyun’s brand-new canvas shoes.

“Oh, _no_,” Kihyun says, dismayed, voice fluttering. “Oh, God, I’m so so sorry. Fuck.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Changkyun says. Kihyun looks up at him sharply, the coffee seeping wet into the ankles of his trousers. “It was my fault, I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

His voice. It’s very deep. Nothing at all like what Kihyun had been expecting — he’d thought it’d be reedy and weak, like the voice of every other virginal boarding-school-educated heir, but it’s deep and full despite his youthful, clumsy pronunciation. Kihyun, caught off-guard, makes an overwhelmed noise and bends down to pick up the collapsed tray, and Changkyun kneels to help him, collecting a stray lid where it had rolled away.

“Thank you,” Kihyun says, glancing up at him when Changkyun hands him one of the cups, when their hands meet. “I’m so sorry again—”

“Oh,” Changkyun says in that voice of his, and he has illuminated, blossomed, gone perfectly still as though a butterfly had just alighted on his shoulder and he’s scared that movement will make it fly away. “Oh, it’s _you.”_

What? “Excuse me?”

“We— well, we have got to stop meeting like this, I bumped into you about a week or so ago,” Changkyun explains, all aglow. 

_What? _When? What the fuck? Oh, no, this is bad. Kihyun is never very nice to the people he bumps into. “Really?” Kihyun says, genuinely a little disquieted. He doesn’t remember ever seeing this face before. He’d have remembered that voice, certainly. He hasn’t accounted for this; _this is not part of the plan. _“Oh, gosh. Um—”

“King’s Street Coffee,” Changkyun insists. “Like, last week, yeah, I think it was last week.”

“Oh,” Kihyun says. He has the vaguest of recollections, now, of getting shoulder-checked and spitting some invective. Oh, dear. But if Changkyun notices the difference in Kihyun’s tone from then to now, he doesn’t say anything, but Kihyun is now smiling his loveliest, and Kihyun wagers he doesn’t notice. “Of course. Wow. Karma, eh?”

“Yeah,” Changkyun says, enthralled, and hands Kihyun another cup. “What are the odds!”

Even higher than you’d think. Kihyun needs to get this back on the track before he loses his chance completely, but if Changkyun wasn’t put off by getting snapped at, there’s still a chance he’ll be able to pull this together. Continuing according to plan: “Oh no, your _shirt!” _Kihyun gasps.

“Your shoes,” Changkyun points out with a very small smile, and Kihyun inhales sharply, looking down at them.

“Oh,” Kihyun says. He bites at his lower lip for half a beat, and his responding smile is rueful, self-conscious, wry. This is the plan; this is correct. He can do this. He’s doing this. “I just got these. But I wasn’t sure if I liked them anyway, so. Talk about a sign, huh?”

The people flooding into Grand Central are going around them, making room, and the spilled coffee is continuing to spread over the floor. Kihyun didn’t think to bring napkins, but he has a change of clothes back at the office, thank God he won’t have to spend the rest of the day being soggy. Changkyun hands Kihyun the last cup and they both stand, both shy, and Kihyun’s heart is thudding in his chest at how close he had just come to utter crushing defeat, but things are turning around, Changkyun doesn’t want to leave, and they both make the same sheepish face at each other and don’t move.

“It’s a shame,” Changkyun says. “Those are cool shoes. Um—” He looks back over his shoulder at one of Grand Central’s many clocks and then looks at Kihyun again. “I’m running late to a meeting, but— tell you what, here.” He wipes his coffee-damp hands off on his jeans and gets out his wallet, out of which he takes a business card, and then a pen from an inside pocket of his stupid tacky sport coat. Kihyun doesn’t dare to say anything, just stands there, staring at him. He’s very different from up close. 

“Here,” Changkyun repeats, scrawling something on the back of the card with his left hand and then extending it to Kihyun. “Call my office, my assistant can replace your shoes for you in, like, an hour. Okay? I’m sorry again, I was just— totally lost in my thoughts, I guess, and—”

Without thinking, Kihyun blurts out, “You have such a beautiful speaking voice.” 

Changkyun, flustered by the interruption, closes his mouth and goes a little red. Kihyun takes the card and looks at the phone number on the back, then carefully tucks the card into one of the inner pockets of his own coat. 

“Thank you,” Kihyun says. “Sorry. Um— sorry. I’ll call you.”

Changkyun nods, his jaw tense, and then looks like he wants to say something, but then stops himself, but then tries again. It’s remarkable, how obviously he doesn’t want to leave — it’s _working. _He wants _more. _“Do you— do you like dinner?”

“Do I like dinner,” Kihyun echoes, fighting back a smile, but not his _real _smile, something far softer. “Yeah, I’d say I like dinner. It’s definitely one of my top three meals.”

“Cool,” Changkyun says, evidently too nervous to laugh at Kihyun’s unfunny joke. God, he’s like a kid. An overgrown child. Blinking at Kihyun from under his fluffy black hair. This is sickeningly easy — doesn’t he have _any_ self-respect? Clearly not. “Wanna get some sometime?”

“I’ll call you,” Kihyun says again, letting that soft, unreal smile come out fully, making his face look all tender. It’s not quite a yes — keep him wanting. Keep him waiting. Changkyun hears it as a yes, though, and he’s beaming as he and Kihyun both stand up.

“I really am running late,” Changkyun says uncertainly.

“And I really will call you,” Kihyun promises, smiling wider. “Go, I’ll call you, I want to get dinner.”

“Okay,” Changkyun says, “okay— yeah, call me. Are you free this weekend? I’m so late!”

“So go!” Kihyun laughs, balancing the coffee cups on the tray. Do people meet each other like this these days? Changkyun doesn’t even know his name. Does he do this often? Just ask out flustered strangers he bumps into, just because they complimented his voice? Definitely a virgin. Definitely repressed. He’s going to be quite the knot to unravel, and Kihyun’s exhausted already. “Changkyun. I’ll call you.”

The power of a name — Changkyun is immediately defused. “Okay, I’m going, call me,” Changkyun says, blushing, and Kihyun gives him one more smile before letting him go and turning to watch him leave, his shoulders hunched up, and Kihyun can tell by the curve of his cheek that he’s smiling.

He’s gone. Even with that unexpected addition of their alleged accidental meeting last week, that had gone better than expected. Kihyun dumps the coffees and takes the card back out to look at it. The front says _Changkyun Im, Executive Board_ with his office address and a phone number. The back has a different number, written in Changkyun’s chicken-scratch handwriting. Cell phone? No way, that’s way too forward for someone who could barely hold eye contact with Kihyun when Kihyun was doing his prettiest smile. Must be a more direct line to his office.

Kihyun figures he’ll risk it sooner rather than later. He waits until he’s back at his desk, though, with clean trousers and shoes and socks on, to decipher the chicken-scratch and call, just in case it is Changkyun’s personal number. But a neutral-voiced assistant answers, and Kihyun hesitantly says, “This is— well, I didn’t give him my name, but—”

“Oh, is this the shoe guy?” says the assistant.

Kihyun coughs, surprised. Changkyun works fast. Pathetic. “Yes, that’s me,” he says. “Kihyun Yoo. You really don’t have to reimburse me, I just— I just said I’d call.”

“Would you rather we deliver to your office or your residence? Also, size 8? 9?”

“7.5,” Kihyun says, bemused, and gives her his office address so he doesn’t come on too strong, since he has no doubt that Changkyun is going to hear all about this interaction whenever he gets back from the _meeting _he was running so late to.

Some typing noises, and the assistant says, “Gotcha. They should be there by the end of the day. What’s your availability this coming Sunday night, and are you allergic to shellfish?”

How romantic, being asked out via assistant. Promising start. It seems Changkyun is kind of a coward. “Completely available, and no, but I don’t like sushi,” Kihyun says, smiling while he’s talking so it sounds like he’s smiling while he’s talking.

The assistant huffs very quietly. More typing. “Sunday, 7 PM, Per Se. Are you familiar, or should I forward you directions?”

“Uh— I’m familiar,” Kihyun says, a little strangled. This is really happening. This is really, really happening— and Changkyun, worth $200 million and all alone, an idiotic overripe plum ready to be plucked from the otherwise fruitless tree on which it gestated, is going to take Kihyun to a restaurant with _three_ Michelin stars for a first date. If he didn’t know this was all a very specific means to a very specific end (although the end is as of yet undetermined, but he’s leaning towards some kind of accidental fall or injury, maybe pushing him overboard when they’re on their honeymoon cruise or something), he’d feel almost giddy. “7, you said?”

“He’ll be there,” the assistant says dryly. “Can I help you with anything else?”

“I don’t think so,” Kihyun says and bites his lip. “Just— tell him thanks?”

“Will do,” says the assistant. “Have a great day.”

Kihyun stares at his phone once she’s hung up. To make things convincing for his coworkers for the months to come, he starts to smile again, disbelieving. The disbelief, at least, is real, and part of the smile — the smug part — is real, too.

The shoes come by the end of the day, as promised. Kihyun’s boss tells him there’s a package for him downstairs that he needs to sign for (seems excessive for an $85 pair of shoes), and Kihyun goes down to the lobby to retrieve the box from the bored courier, who doesn’t ask any questions as to why he’s been sent on this urgent mission to deliver Chuck Taylors to a mid-level manager at an ad agency that’s never worked with KB Pharma and never will. That’s great — the fewer people ask questions going forward, the better. Kihyun likes Changkyun’s assistant for that same reason. He signs for the shoes and takes them back up to his office, and is very nearly disappointed that there’s no note, no personalization. No gift receipt either, which is bold. Is he expected to send a formal thank-you? Maybe, but he’s not going to. He’ll thank him on Sunday.

When he’s back home, he reevaluates his schedule, his outlines. _Month 1: meet, exchange phone numbers, first two dates_, that’s all it says. He can do that. Per Se, oh God. Is he _familiar_. Kihyun maintains a subscription to the Michelin Red Guide, of course he’s fucking familiar with Per Se. It’s a wonder that Changkyun is, though, given his overall state. He’s more Oliver Twist than Little Lord Fauntleroy. How embarrassing for him.

There’s not much Kihyun has to do in order to prepare for this date, since thankfully, his wardrobe is already fairly conservative. It’s better to be overdressed than underdressed in any given situation; that’s been his motto since junior high. Just because he can’t afford to take more than three Ubers a month doesn’t mean he has to look shabby, and as such he has the perfect outfit to wear to this date, barely even needs to think about it: charcoal-grey well-tailored trousers that end just above the ankle (initially bought by his parents at Brooks Brothers back home, one of the very few upsides to knowing how to hem your own pants and not having grown a single inch since the age of 16), pale blue button-up, thin grey merino sweater over the shirt. Dark grey pea coat. All the blues and greys will make his otherwise cold face look warmer, and he’ll finish the look with loafers, of course. And for all his grand notions about not needing to plan this outfit much, he sure has wasted the greater part of an hour twisting and turning in front of his mirror to confirm that he looks docile and approachable.

Saturday doesn’t matter. He cleans his apartment, although there’s not very much to clean, and debates the merits of showing up ten minutes versus five minutes versus three minutes early. Per Se is on the fourth floor of the building it’s in; it’ll take some time to take the elevator up there. Ten minutes is too eager, and there’s a chance Changkyun won’t even be there yet. Three minutes is cutting it too close, but so is five. He’ll be walking into the building eight minutes early, he decides, and that’ll leave him plenty of flexibility either way.

What’s Changkyun’s type? Apparently, he’d reacted positively both to Kihyun’s knee-jerk rudeness and his doe-eyed sweet ingenue act, Wonho-inspired. Which is most likely to keep him interested all the way through to a wedding? Does he like his men to be flamboyant, outgoing? Or a little colder, more refined? Kihyun is hardly masc, but he could try, for Changkyun. He owns flannels. He could do it. If he likes someone brainless, someone to just giggle when he’s trying to be funny and get silly on prosecco, Kihyun will do his best, but that might end up in him expediting his timeline, because affecting that sort of behavior would make _anyone_ homicidal. There’s no way Changkyun’s type is exactly what Kihyun really is — acerbic, judgmental, contemptuous, “like the main girl in every romance novel from the 90s in the, like, 50 pages before she meets the man and gets her spirit broken,” as Minhyuk once said so helpfully — but maybe it’s something close; maybe he wants someone sassy (although Kihyun abhors that word), sarcastic, not easily won over. Maybe he likes the thrill of the chase. Kihyun will give him a quite literal run for his money, if that’s the case. But chances are Changkyun just wants someone to talk to. Kihyun’s not too familiar with rich men, but he somehow knows that men like Changkyun just want to hear the sound of their own voice vicariously through a willing ear.

Sunday. Kihyun has a small breakfast and a smaller lunch, brushes his teeth twice — although he’s not going to kiss him tonight — and leaves for the restaurant with plenty of time to spare, taking the A train up. He’s entirely devoid of expectations, he’s not even nervous, because he knows this’ll go well. Still, he forces himself to act like he is, bouncing his knee as he sits, very lightly nibbling on the inside of his lower lip to make it redder, wetter. It’s still light outside, and Kihyun blinks against the setting sun as he walks to the building in which Per Se is housed.

How funny would it be if Changkyun is planning to kill _him_, Kihyun muses as he goes in, lets the doorman direct him to the elevator that’ll bring him to the fourth floor. Rich people do that sort of thing. Abduct unattached youths for their own sinister purposes. Kihyun would love to see him try.

“Good evening,” says the host, and Kihyun’s shoulders draw together, posture tightening, defensive. “Table for one?”

He _passes_. The host thinks he’s one of _them_. That’s half the battle won. “I’m actually here with someone,” Kihyun says, hesitant, soft. “I’m a little early— the reservation was for 7?”

“Ah,” says the host, his demeanor visibly changing, and if Kihyun had found him obsequious before, now he’s a downright kiss-ass. “Of _course_. Right this way.”

Kihyun follows him into the dining room and Changkyun is already there, brow furrowed as he looks at a menu. Jeans, of course. And a long-sleeve black scoop neck, just a little broad on his already-broad shoulders. Kihyun supposes when you’re worth $200 million you hardly need to wear business formal to one of Manhattan’s most expensive restaurants, but just because he didn’t _need _to doesn’t mean he _shouldn’t_ have.

“I’ll take your coat,” says the host and Changkyun looks up, hearing a voice so close, and goes still and startled when he sees Kihyun.

Kihyun smiles. Shy, nervous. Shrugs out of his coat, lets the host take it with a murmured thank you, and then just stands there, smiling at Changkyun and letting Changkyun smile at him.

“You came!” Changkyun says. He stands, stands just a little too fast, one of the forks on the table jolts. “I mean, you’re here! I don’t know why I thought you wouldn’t show up.”

“I was thinking the same thing about you,” Kihyun admits, his smile softening, cheeks heating up. “But here I am. And here you are. I didn’t mean to keep you waiting— have you been here a long time—?”

“No, literally five minutes, it’s fine,” Changkyun assures him, and makes a quick, awkward motion like he’s going to walk around and pull Kihyun’s chair out for him but Kihyun heads for it first before he can do anything of the sort.

Their table has a beautiful view of Central Park. They both sit down and go back to smiling at each other again. Changkyun has dimples, which make him look much younger than he is and don’t suit him at all. Kihyun knows how to tilt his head to make his eyes sparkle just so, and he does it, and is immensely gratified when Changkyun looks away on a sputtered, quiet laugh.

“What?” Kihyun prompts, smiling broader.

“This is just so weird,” Changkyun says in his deep voice, pronouncing _weird_ with a very firm _r_. “I don’t normally do— things like this. Do you?”

“No,” Kihyun says, then — just to make it fun — amends, “well, only on special occasions.”

“Is this a special occasion?” Changkyun asks. He’s already hanging on each of Kihyun’s words and they’ve exchanged a maximum of twenty sentences. God, the second-hand embarrassment is killer.

Kihyun shrugs one shoulder. “I’ve got new shoes to celebrate.”

Changkyun laughs again, tension visibly going out of him, and he just _gazes _at Kihyun for another second before remembering himself and handing over one of the menus on the table to Kihyun. “It’s a tasting menu, I hope that’s okay. I was thinking we could get one of each and whatever you don’t like, I’ll have, and vice versa?”

“Works for me,” Kihyun says, skimming both menu options. Prix fixe: $355 for one. Holy mother of God. He lets his cheeks go redder, and that’s less pretense and more indignation on behalf of the millions of people in this city who don’t even spend $355 on food in a month. But Kihyun’s no Robin Hood. He’s not supporting a greater cause. Just himself. Keeping it simple. The vegetarian option looks better than the seafood, and he closes the menu and sets it on the table.

“I’m glad you—” Changkyun starts to say right as Kihyun says, “So did your—” and then of course they dither about it for a minute or so, you first no you first no you, sorry, until finally Kihyun shakes his head, giggling, and insists, “_Me_ first. Did your assistant tell you my name? I realized I didn’t even give you my number or anything.”

“Kihyun,” Changkyun says. He keeps doing this glowy thing with his eyes, or maybe it’s just the light. “She told me. I guess we never were formally introduced. Do the shoes fit?”

“I was Cinderella for a day,” Kihyun says. Guess that makes Changkyun his Prince Charming, but he’ll let him draw his own conclusions. “Most other days, though, yes, I’m Kihyun. And I’m usually way better at balancing coffee, I’m still so— I can’t believe I just bumped into you like that.”

“Twice, no less!” Changkyun points out, delighted.

Christ. Kihyun keeps forgetting about that, like his brain is trying to protect him from the shame. “Maybe I am a klutz after all,” he says, and, as though overwhelmed by his own charming clumsiness, he presses a hand against his own forehead, smile as bright as it goes, and Changkyun shakes his head very quickly, beaming.

“Please don’t worry about it,” he says. “It was so lucky— to run into you again— I thought about you the whole week afterwards, never thought I’d— anyway, I’m just so glad you’re here.”

Kihyun blushes and says, “Me, too.”

“Do you want a drink? Here’s the list,” Changkyun says and hands Kihyun a frankly ridiculously huge book, leather-bound. 

“Oh, sure,” Kihyun says. The first page he flips to offers him a bottle of Italian wine for $2,100. Kihyun feels green around the gills and turns to the end, where the cocktails are, and his condition doesn’t improve much. This he doesn’t have to fake — he’s completely out of his depth. “Um— I think you should just order for me.”

“It’s okay,” Changkyun says and leans in closer, his hand coming up to close over the other end of the wine list. He lowers his voice to a whisper. He’s smiling. “Don’t worry. To be honest, I have no idea what any of it means, either.”

Kihyun smiles back. Conspiratorial, fun. But inside he’s seething. Just order a nice Riesling for the table and don’t be an idiot. Reared in the lap of luxury and he can’t read a wine list? Pathetic. “Okay,” Kihyun whispers back. “Can we ask the waiter?”

“Yeah,” Changkyun says. Kihyun hasn’t smiled this much in a long time and it’s making his cheeks start to hurt already, and when Changkyun leans back with the wine list, Kihyun lifts a hand up to idly rub at his lower jaw to ease some of the tension. 

The waiter comes. Changkyun does order for them: one ‘tasting of vegetables,’ one ‘Chef’s tasting menu.’ Chef’s choice of wine to accompany the meal. Minimal service, if possible. Of course, sir. The waiter leaves.

So Changkyun wants privacy. He should have booked a booth, then. Kihyun smiles at him, then glances out over the park. “This place is beautiful.”

“You like it?” Changkyun says, perking up. 

Kihyun hums in assent, looking at him again. “Like something out of a book. Or a fantasy. That view!”

“It’s a great view,” Changkyun agrees, looking directly at Kihyun.

Kihyun has to pinch his own knee under the table to keep from grimacing. Is this what passes for romance these days? Awful, cheesy, cliché? All he does outwardly, though, is make a vague, embarrassed noise, starting to smile again. That, in turn, makes Changkyun smile, and Kihyun can’t go through this whole smiling-and-gazing-and-smiling-and-gazing thing for the fifth time in as many minutes, so he clears his throat, sits up straighter, and says, “So tell me about yourself. Isn’t that what people do on dates? Find out about each other?”

Changkyun, visibly thrilled by Kihyun calling it a date, adjusts the sleeve of his shirt and says, “There’s not much to tell.”

“Come on, I’m curious,” Kihyun coaxes. “What do you do?”

“I’m… technically in pharmaceuticals,” Changkyun says, his head tilting to the side uncomfortably. Shy to talk about himself, fine. Self-conscious of his wealth, his status. “It’s not a very interesting company. Or a very interesting subject. It’s not what I wanted to go into, but it just sort of happened that way.”

“What did you want to go into?” Kihyun says, and reminds himself to hold back, let Changkyun tell without being interrogated. He sips his ice water. It tastes like wealth. Kihyun has another sip.

“Complicated question,” Changkyun says, “and I never really got the chance to find out the answer. I majored in English in college, though.”

Kihyun’s eyes widen. “Me, too!”

“No _way!”_ Changkyun says, childishly excited about this. “Where’d you go to school?”

“Buffalo,” Kihyun says. “And now I’m in advertising, so, hey. Look at both of us, making good use of our degrees.”

Changkyun laughs, and the waiter brings out the first courses, a minuscule cup of light green soup for Kihyun and an equally minuscule dish of caviar for Changkyun. Changkyun gallantly offers some to Kihyun before he tries it himself, but Kihyun shakes his head in a polite no thank you and tries his soup instead. It’s divine — chilled, very nearly floral. A pleased shiver runs down his spine, and he says, “_Yes_,” when Changkyun asks if it’s good.

“Yeah, so, English major,” Changkyun continues, operating the microscopic caviar spoon like a pro. “My program, the program I was in, it was really focused on the Great Books, you know? Which is great, I love a great book. But it turned out I was either a modernist or a classicist. Nothing in between.”

“Oh, really,” Kihyun says. This ramekin holds barely half a cup of soup and Kihyun’s eating slow, knowing he needs to savor this. “Classics as in Britain, or Greece?”

“Greece. Sometimes Rome.”

“Sometimes,” Kihyun agrees, granting him another smile. “I was classics as in Britain.”

“I did some of that, too,” Changkyun says. Christ, here we go. “I took a great course on— what was it. Romanticism. Loved that.”

Kihyun makes a very appreciative noise, swallowing another perfect mouthful. “But you preferred modernism?”

“Weeeeeell,” Changkyun says. “Modern as in— not old. Genre stuff, you know. Sci-fi. Experimental literature. I started writing a thesis about _House of Leaves_ but, uh, never finished it.”

“The thesis or the book?” Kihyun clarifies, testing the waters when it comes to dry, teasing humor, and the waters are warm and inviting, Changkyun laughing altogether too brightly for Per Se at 7:15 on a Sunday and shaking his head.

“The _thesis_. I’ve read the book, like, a thousand times. But,” Changkyun says, interrupting himself and getting thoughtful, “I should have just stuck with Catullus. My first love.”

No, Kihyun thinks. Oh, don’t do it. Don’t do it. He can tell that Changkyun is going to do it, and yet part of him hopes wildly that he won’t, but—

“_Da mi basia mille, deinde ceintum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,_” Changkyun says, and Kihyun takes in a shocked breath, his smile startled but impressed. “_Deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum—_ God, I always forget how repetitive that one is.”

His Latin is shit. It’s beyond shit. “Do you have a whole Catullus poem memorized in the original Latin?” Kihyun clarifies, amazed. If he has to listen to this clown butchering Catullus for one more second, this plan will be over before it’s truly begun, because there’s a steak knife on an adjacent table within grabbing reach and he knows how to strike all the major arteries. 

“Well, almost,” Changkyun says modestly. 

Kihyun shakes his head slightly in awe, swallowing his murderous rage. The performance, blessedly, seems to be over. “All I managed to memorize over the course of my college career were the dirtiest parts of _Lady Chatterley’s Lover._ I’d quote them, but I think we might get kicked out.”

“Rain check?” Changkyun asks, and Kihyun laughs, and they grin at each other as the waiter silently takes away their tiny, empty plates.

“Don’t get the wrong idea, that really was for my thesis,” Kihyun says. Changkyun invites him to continue with a soft hum, a tilt of his chin forwards, his eyes so eager. “I wrote it about tenderness. Did you know that was going to be D. H. Lawrence’s original title? _Tenderness? _The whole novel is heavy with it. But people only ever remember the sex.”

Changkyun shakes his head. His eyes are ridiculous. “I’ll have to reread it,” he says. “I never noticed.”

“Once you start noticing, you won’t be able to stop,” Kihyun says, and the waiter brings the second courses: interestingly, both of them feature white asparagus.

“How old are you?” Changkyun asks with the kind of unrestrained interest that can only come as a result of spending two days thinking about someone nonstop. 

“Twenty-seven,” Kihyun says with a rueful twist to his mouth. “Please don’t tell me I look forty, I know that already.”

“_What? _I could have sworn you were younger than me, and I’m only twenty-five!” Changkyun says, wide-eyed, sincere, it’s not even _flattery_, he’s just like this. “Where did you grow up?”

Now Kihyun is the one being interrogated, and now he’s starting to understand what sort of man Changkyun wants — not even the thrill of the chase, but a puzzlebox for him to unpack, just interesting enough to keep Changkyun trying to align his expectations with reality. Full of surprises. “Upstate, sort of near Rochester,” he says. “I was born there, too. First-generation. How about yourself?”

“I was born in Boston, but we lived in Pohang for a while, then came back to Boston, then settled here, and then—” Changkyun’s jaw works for a second and he pushes through it, finishes, “then I stayed.”

He’d been about to say something about his parents, how they’re dead. But he’d stopped himself so deliberately that it indicates that he thought about this, reminded himself not to bring out the tragic backstory on the first date. Or maybe Kihyun has to coax it out of him, make him feel comfortable enough to tell. Kihyun’s got time. 

“Your voice is very pan-New England,” Kihyun says with a small smile. “Want to try my tartelette?”

“I’d love to,” Changkyun says and they switch plates.

“How many courses are there?” Kihyun asks. These servings are _not _big, but he’s so thrilled just to be there that he couldn’t care less, neither about the portion size nor about what a miserable companion Changkyun is already proving himself to be.

“I think nine,” Changkyun says. 

From up here, it’s hard to hear the noise of the city. Maybe the windows are just thick. Kihyun slides Changkyun’s plate back over to him and smiles, his smile only widening when he realizes that the reason Changkyun’s head looks so asymmetrical today is because not only are his ears pierced, but he’s wearing mismatched earrings. One shorter, one longer. He must think he’s so cool. Or, at the very least, he must desperately want Kihyun to think he’s cool. 

“You have— um,” Changkyun says and goes very red, which only makes him look younger. “You… sorry, I was just going to say that you have such a nice smile but then I realized that would make me sound, uh, lame.”

“That’s not lame,” Kihyun assures him, breathy, endeared. He _hates _self-deprecation as a flirting tactic. “I think you’re so sweet. Is that why you asked me out after I spilled coffee on you and we talked for thirty seconds? Because of my smile?” And he makes it sound surprised and flattered instead of mocking, doing that same smile for him, just for him.

“I— I’m normally not that impulsive, but I just— you seemed really, like— did you ever read _Anne of Green Gables?”_

Kihyun doesn’t know if it’s a good or bad thing that he can follow Changkyun’s train of thought as easily as he can. “A kindred spirit,” he says. “I know exactly what you mean.”

Changkyun’s face lights up again. There go his dimples. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, exactly. So I’m sorry if I freaked you out, but—”

“You didn’t at all,” Kihyun assures him and makes a _move_, reaches across the table to touch Changkyun’s forearm, just a light press of his fingertips. “I’m glad. It’s so hard to meet people these days, you know? Everything is so— so impersonal. It almost makes me miss college, sometimes. Being constantly surrounded by people like you.”

“I think we had very different college experiences,” Changkyun says with a small twist to his mouth, but he’s looking down at Kihyun’s hand on his arm and his smile is so shy, a schoolboy with a crush. “Columbia isn’t really the most conducive to making friends.”

Humblebrag about going to an Ivy, okay. It was only a matter of time, and Kihyun’s surprised he lasted this long without namedropping. “Ooh, well,” Kihyun says, leaving his hand there since Changkyun likes it so much, not even pulling back when the waiter comes to replace their plates with the third course and set wine glasses down. “Their loss, right? Columbia, huh, wow. I was going to guess you went to Brown.”

“Really?” Changkyun says, _beyond _enthused. “_Thank _you. Do you like scallops?”

“They’re okay,” Kihyun says and they switch plates again. He can do this; it’ll be so easy. All he has to do to appeal to Changkyun, evidently, is call him eccentric, intended as an insult but coming across as the sincerest flattery. 

“I know what you mean, though,” Changkyun says. He talks with his mouth full, which is a habit Kihyun is going to have to beat out of him for both of their sakes, but he has to force himself to keep from saying anything just yet. “About meeting people. I’m, like, really shitty at texting, which is like a death sentence in this city.”

“Tell me about it,” Kihyun agrees. Good, now he won’t have to spend all day on his phone exchanging flirtatious emojis with Changkyun. He’s long since accepted texting as a necessary evil, being friends with Minhyuk and Wonho meant he could join or die, but this comes as a relief. “And then my coworkers make fun of me for preferring phone calls! See, maybe I don’t _look _forty— to you, anyway— but sometimes I really feel like it.”

“We should just go back to sending smoke signals,” Changkyun nods.

“Carrier pigeons, that’s what I always say.”

“Or semaphore,” Changkyun says. Christ, he’s barely even kidding. Kihyun is appalled. But he reminds himself that banter like this is supposed to be fun and gives Changkyun a sparkly-eyed smile, then eats a scallop, buttery and rich and perfect. 

The wine is perfect, too. Kihyun doesn’t know which one it is, since the chef purportedly chose it, but in the end it doesn’t matter — it pairs well with the food, and it probably costs some insane amount per glass, and this is going spectacularly well so far. 

“I feel like we should toast,” Kihyun says, and Changkyun nods, picking up his glass. “What should we toast to?”

Letting Changkyun pick is the gentlest of power moves, and it’s pre-manipulation, so Changkyun can guide Kihyun on what to do for him next, what shape to contort himself into that’ll be most pleasing to his eye. Changkyun makes a thoughtful noise, then says, “To the future.”

Kihyun couldn’t agree with him more. “To the future,” he says after him, quieter, warmer, and clinks their glasses together. They hold eye contact as they drink.

The next course is bread and butter: Kihyun’s is a brioche, Changkyun’s is some sort of roll. Changkyun offers half to Kihyun, but Kihyun declines, saying, “I have this weird thing about bread rolls.”

“Which is?” Changkyun says, so curious and eager and interested even though Kihyun’s literally just about to tell him something about his personal attitudes towards _bread_. Whoever came up with the concept of curiosity killing the cat should have met Changkyun — that’d give them unreal amounts of validation. 

“I just don’t like them,” Kihyun shrugs, a small smile on his face. “My birthday’s right around Thanksgiving, and a lot of the time we just had, like, multipurpose things instead of dedicated events, and I can never decide if I treasure those memories or if I hate them, but either way, that’s what bread rolls make me think of. Sorry, is this TMI? I know it’s stupid to be biased against bread rolls.”

“It’s okay, I asked!” Changkyun says. “No bread rolls, got it!”

Kihyun bites his lip to keep his smile from getting too out of control, buttering his brioche. “It’s not that big of a deal. I’m sure that’s a wonderful bread roll.”

“It is pretty good,” Changkyun admits, chewing. “When’s your birthday?”

“November 22.”

“So that makes you… a…” Changkyun wrinkles his nose, thinking. It looks like it’s taking some effort. “Hang on.”

“It’s cusp,” Kihyun fills in for him. “Scorpio-Sagittarius.”

Changkyun ahhs sagely, nodding. “Which one do you feel more like?”

Finally: the first real, unabashed lie of the night. “Sagittarius,” Kihyun says. 

“Oh, I definitely see that,” Changkyun nods, his eyes all crinkled at the corners. “Aquarius, myself. But I don’t really believe in astrology. Do you?”

“Let’s just say I won’t be doing our compatibility charts when I get home,” Kihyun says, and they both laugh, like the polite Manhattanite millennial twenty-somethings they both are for tonight. 

Kihyun had an outline for this date, too. So far it’s going very much according to plan. He’s talked about literature and made himself seem smart, but also acted impressed by Changkyun’s accomplishments: check. Provided a strange, irrelevant detail about his life to be Changkyun’s typical quirky manic pixie dream boy: check. Laughed at unfunny jokes, batted his eyelashes, bemoaned how difficult it is to find the right _someone_ in this day and age: check, check, check. Hook. The line and sinker will have to wait for dates two and three.

Courses six and seven: rabbit and pasta, then savory mille-feuille and rack of lamb. There’s a change in the wine. Changkyun hangs on every word Kihyun says, so Kihyun doesn’t say too many, just to make sure Changkyun has something to look forward to. They’re discussing work: Changkyun has managed to admit to being on the executive board by way of inheritance, but provided no further details as to the origin of said inheritance.

“By far the weirdest part,” he says, a touch of melancholy in his already gloomy voice, “is having to work all summer. I think part of me never— never got older than 18. It’s like I’m still stuck at college, like… a Circadian rhythm, but my whole _existence_, not just my day-to-day. I’m just used to having those three months off, I guess.”

“You’re in charge,” Kihyun points out softly. “Can’t you just leave?”

Changkyun shakes his head. “They’d let me, but _I_ won’t let me.”

How _noble_. “How selfless,” Kihyun observes, quiet. “I think you deserve a break. Maybe three whole months is a little long, but. Vacations are nice.”

“Where should I go?” Changkyun asks with so much interest, genuine curiosity, he’s _really _soliciting Kihyun’s opinion. Kihyun could give him any location and he’d book a plane ticket tomorrow.

It’s a lot of power. Kihyun tries not to let it go to his head all at once. “Saint Petersburg,” Kihyun says after a moment of consideration. 

“Florida or Russia?” Changkyun says.

He’s so fucking unfunny. He’s so unfunny that it almost circles back around to being funny, but he’s definitely not funny. Kihyun laughs, bright and happy, and smiles at Changkyun with all the fondness of someone who’s known him for years and years and years. “Russia. Although I hear the Floridian one is nice, too.”

“Got a coin?” Changkyun says, patting down his pockets.

Kihyun could cry. Changkyun makes more money in a week than Kihyun has ever seen in his life and he doesn’t carry any change on him. “Yes, I think so,” he says and gets out his wallet, where he always keeps at least a few quarters, just in case. “Here.”

“Yosemite, neat,” Changkyun says, checking out the design on the back of the quarter and then balancing it on the top of his thumb. “Well? Heads Russia, tails Florida?”

Kihyun nods, leaning forward over the table to see what he’s doing, and Changkyun flicks his fingers and the coin goes up into the air, tumbling over itself as they both watch its trajectory. Changkyun catches it out of the air, presses it onto the back of his other hand, and looks at Kihyun, one eyebrow quirking up. “Any guesses?”

Never mind the statistical idiocy of trying to predict a 50-50 chance. “Florida,” Kihyun says.

Changkyun lifts his palm to peek at the coin and hums. Aiming for mysterious and missing by a mile. He grins, rakish, devil-may-care, and Kihyun scoots his chair in closer, encouraged.

“Was I right?” he insists. “Where are you headed off to?”

“You’ll see,” Changkyun shrugs. “I’ll send you a postcard.”

Kihyun’s cheeks go pink. “Hey.”

“Or you could just come with me,” Changkyun adds, but his confidence runs out midway through the sentence and he starts dimpling all over the place again. “I hear Eastern Europe is a little chilly this time of year, so you’ll have to bring a good coat.”

“_Hey_,” Kihyun says again, blushing harder. 

Back to smiling-and-gazing. Changkyun tries to give Kihyun the coin back, and Kihyun magnanimously says, “Please, please, it’s yours, just don’t spend it all in one place,” and then they giggle about that for some time, and they’re still giggling when the waiter comes to bring them the eighth course, various selections of cheeses.

It would be gauche to ask for any of this to go. Kihyun forces himself to keep eating, although those tiny plates really added up somehow. He declines a third glass of wine, and Changkyun, blinking heavily across the table at him with his dark eyes, does the same, taking cues from Kihyun. Their non-utensil hands are getting closer and closer on the table, too shy to touch again, and Changkyun orders tea for both of them to go with the final courses. Kihyun watches the line of his jaw as he speaks. He… could be harder on the eyes, Kihyun supposes. But that might just be the two glasses of wine and the dinner worth $710 before the wine, taxes, and tip talking.

“God,” Changkyun says, startled, as the waiter brings them a selection of sweets to close out the meal. It’s sumptuous despite the size — Kihyun hardly knows where to start. “We’ve been here for almost two hours.”

“Time flies when you’re having fun?” Kihyun suggests, coy, and is rewarded with a nervous, giddy cough. God. Kihyun had expected it would take a couple dates, maybe three, to get his hand curled inexorably around the puppet strings controlling the marionette that is Changkyun, but all it took was two hours of effusive small talk, nothing more, nothing less. 

“Yeah,” Changkyun says. The sun has long since set— in the dimmer light, his eyes are even more— Kihyun can’t pick a word. It’s almost _concerning_. At this rate, Kihyun’s going to have to keep Changkyun leashed to him, permitted to stray no more than ten feet from his side, because who’s to say he won’t give someone else these eyes, whoever lets him talk about Catullus and clumsily attempt horrible, corny pick-up lines next? Unacceptable. “Oh! Oh. Before I forget. Can I have your number?”

“Oh— yes,” Kihyun says, and they get out their phones at the same time. “Are you going to text me?”

“Maybe,” Changkyun says, grinning toothily. “Maybe I’ll just call.”

They swap phones and exchange contacts. Kihyun puts his full name in, no frills, but Changkyun puts himself in as just Changkyun. When Kihyun returns his phone to him, Changkyun smiles at the new contact so fondly, so warmly, that one might think he’d just been given a precious gift, something personal, hand-made, not the phone number of a grouchy soon-to-be-attempted-and-succeeded murderer. Kihyun smiles, too, and takes his final bite.

The food has made them both warm and comfortable, and Kihyun can see that Changkyun wants to ask him out for a follow-up drink somewhere else — something in the way he keeps looking at Kihyun’s neck, plaintive. But Kihyun has limits. Kihyun has a schedule. He’s sticking to it. “I have an early day tomorrow,” he says, apologetic, and Changkyun, Prince Charming-gallant, waves down a waiter to get the check.

“I’m so sorry for keeping you,” Changkyun starts to say, but he stops talking so quickly — God, that’s nice, can he do that more often? — when Kihyun reaches across the table and covers both his hands with both of his own.

“It’s fine,” he assures. “This was really, really wonderful. I wish I could stay. But Cinderella for a day means I have to get back before the pumpkins come out, hmm?”

Changkyun slowly turns his hands over underneath Kihyun’s so that their fingers will touch. His skin is smooth and warm. No hard labor in his life. Milk baths and private jets and boarding school and everything he’s ever wanted. “When can I see you again?” he asks in that voice so low, and Kihyun shivers, just a little.

“If you’re not in Russia by the end of the week, I’m free after Wednesday,” he replies, also talking quiet, letting his smile bloom more slowly. “Is that soon enough?”

“No,” Changkyun says immediately. “But if you promise I can see you again after Wednesday, then I’ll live.”

Not for long! “I promise,” Kihyun says and squeezes Changkyun’s hands. “Just call me. Can I pick where we go next time?”

“Okay,” Changkyun says, so out of breath so quickly just because Kihyun showed _initiative_. 

“Your check, sir,” says a waiter who sort of glided up out of nowhere, and Changkyun, without looking away from Kihyun, lets go of one hand so he can pull his wallet out and pass him one of the cards from within. Kihyun’s peripheral vision notes that it’s a black card: not bad. 

“Oh, my God,” Kihyun says, and covers his face with his now-free hand, smiling behind his palm. “You— thank you for dinner.”

“Don’t mention it,” Changkyun says with genuine embarrassment. Kihyun’s so mad that he correctly clocked him for being shy about his wealth. What a disappointment. Kihyun isn’t going for flashy, here, but he’d at least like some _flair_. 

“Thank you,” Kihyun says again, softer, and Changkyun — getting bold, apparently — squeezes Kihyun’s hand in return.

The waiter returns Changkyun’s card, the check, and their coats. What a wonderful date. Kihyun means that, he really does. That couldn’t have gone better or more according to his plan. Changkyun holds the door for him on their way out to the elevator, and they walk side by side, too shy to look directly at each other but both smiling. 

It’s cold outside and Kihyun pulls his coat tighter around himself, looking up at the tall buildings lining Central Park. “Which one is yours?” he asks, whimsical.

Changkyun smiles, but not in a way that says it’d be ridiculous to even assume he has a penthouse with a hundred feet of Central Park-facing windows, because of course that’s not ridiculous. With him, everything is very much within the realm of possibility. “I live in Soho,” is all he says.

“Ah,” Kihyun says. Of course he fucking does. “I’m in Chelsea. So I’m just gonna…” He checks his watch. “Take the 1.”

“Do you want me to call you a cab?” Changkyun offers instantly and Kihyun laughs, very gently pressing his hand to Changkyun’s arm.

“No, it’s okay. But you’re very sweet,” he says, not for the first time tonight. Just as before, that seems to hit Changkyun pretty hard, because his smile is dopey, too giddy to leave any room for self-aware coolness. Not a bad look on him, but not a good one, either. He should be more careful. “I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”

“I’ll see you after Wednesday,” Changkyun nods.

“You will,” Kihyun says.

Changkyun expects a kiss, but he’s not going to get one, not tonight. Kihyun hesitates for just long enough to make him think— think that maybe, here it comes, but— then he smiles at him again, looks at his face, then away, then at him one more time, then steps aside with a small, shy wave. 

“Good night,” Changkyun says, and Kihyun smiles, and smiles, and smiles.

The next morning, Kihyun gets to the office, and the interns are tittering amongst themselves. Kihyun strongly believes that nobody should be in such a good mood this early in the day, so he’s scowling as he walks past them and to his desk, but then— he sees it. His desk. 

Roses. Red roses, dozens of them, well over fifty, probably. The bouquet is massive. Takes up half the surface area of Kihyun’s desk, luscious. He can practically smell it from here. 

“Oh,” Kihyun says, fighting hard to keep from smiling.

“Delivery for you,” one of the interns says very unhelpfully.

There’s a note tucked in among the roses. Changkyun seems to have hand-written it, so it’s barely legible. It says: “_It was a warm spring day, with a perfume of earth and of yellow flowers, many things rising to bud, and the garden still with the very sap of sunshine_. Call me soon?” Unsigned, naturally. Brat.

Well, it’s 50 degrees today, the flowers are red, and the sun is hidden behind a thick layer of clouds, as usual. So he’s wrong on all counts, zero for three. He must have stayed up for hours reading _Lady Chatterley’s Lover _to try and find a suitable quote — or, and this is more likely, he just googled some — and this is what he picked? From a melancholy scene that concerns the death of a husband? How oddly fitting. 

_Perfect_, Kihyun thinks. _The witless fool has just fallen into my lap_. And he barely even had to do anything at all to get him there.

“Don’t you have work to do?” he snips at the interns, but without any heat to it, still smiling that private, just-for-Changkyun smile as he rereads the note and sits down at his desk, his view of the whole office hidden by the flowers. Changkyun should be thanking his lucky stars that Kihyun doesn’t have any kind of flower-related allergy, or else the consequences would be dire. 

Now Kihyun doesn’t know what to do with all these flowers. How did pretty secretaries in the 1960s function? Where is he meant to put them? He tries to shift the vase to the side, but it’s heavy and he doesn’t get far, not wanting to scratch the surface of the desk. Changkyun really didn’t think this one through — maybe he mistakenly thought Kihyun had a whole office to himself with multiple flat surfaces on which to deposit extravagant floral arrangements, not a glorified extra-large cubicle with a desk, a chair, and a very small filing cabinet that doubles as a printer stand. 

Kihyun gives up on trying to move the flowers and sighs, leaning back in his desk chair. Well, he may as well call Changkyun now and thank him, get it over with. And give the interns something to gossip about for the rest of the day. There are few things Kihyun hates more than other people knowing his business, so he’ll keep his voice down, but when the wedding announcement is published in the Times, he doesn’t want any surprised acquaintance getting nosy and commenting that it all seems to have happened rather quickly.

He calls. Tries to lift the edge of one rose cluster up while the phone rings, but he can’t even see the vase underneath all the blooms. It’d be funny if it weren’t such an inconvenience. Roses? He couldn’t think of a more original flower? Kihyun doesn’t care how expensive this bouquet must have been, it’s bland and unimaginative and he’s disappointed in Changkyun, who, for all his attempts at being unconventional, is clearly as cliché and stupid as—

“Good morning,” Changkyun murmurs, and Kihyun inhales, the hair on the back of his neck prickling instinctively, viscerally. 

It takes him a moment to respond. “Morning,” he says, reminding himself to smile. Just because Changkyun’s voice is a low rumble in his ear doesn’t mean he has to lose his cool or lose sight of the target. “Something really weird happened to me today.”

“Oh, yeah? What was it?”

Kihyun can picture him. Up in his ivory tower. Corner office to himself — waving a hand to his assistant to leave him alone and close the door behind her as she goes. Lounging, sprawled out on the leather sofa he no doubt has in there, the king of his own pointless castle. Trying to be suave, worldly, powerful. Kihyun pictures him trying to sit up from said leather sofa but struggling, and his smile gets a lot more genuine. 

“I got to my desk, and the biggest bouquet I’ve ever seen in my life was sitting right on top of it,” Kihyun replies. “Red roses, actually. Very romantic. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about it, would you?”

Changkyun hums, probably taking some time to collect his thoughts and pick the perfect stupid corny line to come back at him with. “Well, wasn’t there a note?”

“It wasn’t signed,” Kihyun says and, hating himself, pouts, to the extent that it’ll be audible in his voice. “So I don’t even know whom to thank.”

Changkyun laughs softly, _why_ is his voice so much deeper in the mornings, and then Kihyun remembers — remembers that he doesn’t come into the office until about ten or so, and he must still be in bed. He adjusts his mental image. Rumpled hair, propped half-up and warm in his king-size four-poster on 3,000-thread-count sheets, wearing monogrammed silk pajamas, undone down to his chest. Kihyun is repulsed by his laziness. Even if he doesn’t care about the work his company does, the very least he could do is show up on time, show some respect for his employees, for his parents’ legacy. Disappointing as ever.

“Thank you,” he says anyway, lowering his voice, smiling more. “They’re so beautiful, Changkyun, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I came in and saw them.”

“I’m just glad you like them,” Changkyun says. 

“I really do,” Kihyun says, hating them more the longer he has to look at them. “Are you free Thursday?”

“I am,” Changkyun says, no hesitation. “Where are we going?”

Kihyun bites his lip, smiling. “Is Brooklyn too far?” After an enthusiastic nuh-uh from Changkyun, he continues, “There’s a bar that has nightly shows, indie bands. Sometimes they’re totally shitty, sometimes they’re great. Do we feel lucky? It’s either that or a bakery that only sells pie.”

“Do we have time for both?” Changkyun says thoughtfully.

Kihyun, like most of the white-collar workers in this city, has to be in the office at 9 on the dot, but sure, he can stay up late to galavant around with this overgrown child just because Changkyun can’t decide between hearing some songs or eating some sweets. “Definitely,” he says. “I’ll be done with work at 5, but then I’ll need to go home and change, so… how about we meet at the pie shop at 6:30? Bar after?”

“Perfect,” Changkyun says. “Send me the address?”

So much sincerity. His life must be so sad that the only thing he can get this excited about is a pie-and-live-music date with a waspish advertising manager who’s planning to kill him. “Okay,” Kihyun says and smiles. “So I’ll see you then.”

Changkyun breathes out quietly, probably trying to keep from whining about how that’s so long to wait. “See you then,” he agrees.

“I’ll send you the address right now,” Kihyun says, still smiling to himself, looking over the mountain of flowers. “Bye.”

Changkyun echoes his farewell, and Kihyun is willing to go through all manner of humiliations for the sake of securing his finances for the rest of his life, but he will _not _endure any sort of “you hang up first” kind of situation, so he just hangs up and looks up the bakery in question so he can text Changkyun the address. And so that’s the first exchange of texts they ever have, Kihyun sending the address with no context, Changkyun replying immediately with _I can’t wait._

He can, of course, and he will. A key part of Kihyun’s plan, according to his schedule, is pacing. If they see each other too often, too soon, if Kihyun gives him too much all at once, there’s a chance Changkyun will get what he wanted and lose interest, or it’ll seem like Kihyun is only interested in having a fling. But this isn’t a fling. This is life until death, this has to be real love for Changkyun, enough that he signs his whole everything over to Kihyun, a perfect stranger in every sense, without a second thought. Kihyun redistributes the roses into several vases scrounged up from various areas of the office and shares them with his less intolerable coworkers, and coyly declines to answer any questions as to who sent the flowers in the first place and why.

Changkyun hadn’t been kidding: he really is very bad at texting. Kihyun had expected at least a daily good morning/good night, but he doesn’t even get _that_ much. He keeps iMessage pulled up on his laptop and about once a day sees an indicator that Changkyun is typing, but he never sends anything. Kihyun, meanwhile, continues to fill out his schedule. _Month 2: text friends that met someone. Month 3: allow a visit at work. Month 4: my lease expires - see what happens. If no luck, try again in month 7. See what happens._

As vague as possible, still. Maybe he should write in actual code — that’s not a bad idea. It’s a slow day at work, so Kihyun wastes some time reading about various cryptographic systems.

_All_ of this is just wasting time, honestly. He finds himself wishing it were Thursday already; not because he misses Changkyun, wants to see him, or even looks forward to the date they’re going to go on, but because 18 months is a long time, his apartment is so small, and he’s tired, he’s so tired constantly. And impatient. He knows how to be patient, has trained himself to bide his time, but the action of a behavior is very different from true ability. He wishes he could jump through time, see himself alone in the mansion he’s going to make Changkyun buy for him, and stay there without all this in the in-between. But the in-between is where he is, so he’d better make the most of it for now.

Finally, Thursday. Kihyun manages a three-minute shower after getting back to his apartment once he’s done with work, and his date outfit is a lot more casual this time, dark-wash skinny jeans, the Converse that Changkyun got for him, a turtleneck, a warm bomber jacket to go on top. He might just fit in with the hipsters of Brooklyn. It’s 40 minutes on the train to the bakery, and he texts Changkyun that he’s on his way. The finishing touch of the outfit for tonight is a very lightly tinted chapstick, which Kihyun applies exactly 13 minutes before he’s due to arrive at the bakery. Just enough to leave his lips pink and inviting, but not so much that it looks like he’s done anything to them. If it makes Changkyun look at his mouth even half as much as he did over dinner on Sunday, it’s a win in his book.

Changkyun is waiting outside the bakery. Kihyun sees him from half a block away. His hair is all over the place and he’s wearing a navy-blue sweater with a goldfinch embroidered on it; Kihyun can nearly guarantee that it cost about two months’ worth of Kihyun’s rent. He looks nervous — he must not get out much. Kihyun swallows a laugh and walks faster to get to him sooner.

“Changkyun!” he calls, lighting up in such a bright smile, lifting a hand to wave to him.

Changkyun’s smile rivals Kihyun’s in terms of radiance and he puts his phone — which he’d been mechanically scrolling through — in his back pocket, running a hand through his hair. “Hey,” he says. “You look so good.”

“Hi, so do you,” Kihyun says, and very natural-like, they hug, as though they’re old lovers coming together after a parting of only an hour, not two halves of a business transaction, the before and the after. Changkyun is warm to the touch, he must always run hot, hence him never wearing a fucking coat, and they hold each other for only a good-natured moment before letting go at the same time. “How long have you been here? You could have gone in and ordered!”

“I tried, but I couldn’t pick a flavor,” Changkyun says and opens the door for Kihyun. His cheeks have gone pink and he can’t stop smiling, even as he follows Kihyun in. “Have you had dinner?”

“I’m about to,” Kihyun says, gesturing to the rows of pies. “Which one looks good?”

“All of them,” Changkyun says. If Kihyun had to guess his mental age, he’d ignore what Changkyun said about not aging psychologically past 18 and would place him at a solid 7. He’s the worst kind of 7-year-old, too, because he has the finances to support his impulsiveness, and so they get very nearly one of each: apple rose, salted caramel, lavender honey, chocolate chess, lemon chess, and two bottles of sparkling water. 

They sit by one of the windows, their knees pressing together under the small metal-legged table, and share. The pies are rustic and delicious, only made better by the fact that Changkyun paid for them, his fingers warm and gentle on Kihyun’s wrist to push it back down when Kihyun tried to get his wallet out. He really is very gentle. It’s laughable, honestly. Kihyun’s never been one to understand the fascination straight men have with being an alpha male, with being masculine and authoritative, but when he sees Changkyun, wealthy and delicate and acquiescing to anything, everything just to make Kihyun smile on date _two_, he can’t help but disdain him for being so… submissive. Not in a BDSM way (although that would be interesting, if only he weren’t such a virgin) — just in the way where he lets Kihyun have the last bite of the pie he likes best, in the way where, in conversation, he lets Kihyun talk first, never interrupts, even when his eyes go bright with the impulse of something to say. He’s polite. Trying so hard to impress. He talks for four minutes straight about the future of AI tech, about what it means to be human in a world where machines and people are nearly indistinguishable, and Kihyun can see how eager he is to please him, how desperate he is for Kihyun to want to hear what he has to say. So Kihyun listens. He can already tell he’s going to be doing a lot of that.

Kihyun hadn’t entered into this expecting to be as active as he’s having to be. He deliberately gets whipped cream on the corner of his mouth and Changkyun just points it out politely, doesn’t even try to thumb it away for him. It’s not that Changkyun isn’t interested — he’s _so _interested — but he’s shy to the point of absurdity, clearly not wanting to overstep, not wanting to force his affection on Kihyun. Kihyun would be okay with that, at this point. Changkyun has a very narrow window in which Kihyun will permit him to establish how this relationship is going to go, and if he keeps this up, he’s going to miss his chance. But Kihyun doesn’t mind being the more confident one, if that’s the role Changkyun wants him to take. 

Changkyun is too helpless to do much, anyway. Kihyun laughs at one of his jokes just right and Changkyun is out of commission for the next few seconds, chest proud but face shy, like he can’t believe his luck and yet still feels like he deserves it. That’s the dichotomy of him. Between the two of them, they polish off the five slices of pie, and Kihyun looks up which train they need to take to get to the bar.

“It’s half an hour,” he says apologetically. “Maybe we should have just picked one, not both. We can go to a bar around here, if that’s…?”

“No, I want to go to the one you picked,” Changkyun insists, smiling at him all comforting, all sweet. Like he doesn’t want Kihyun to worry. This date is going perfectly, is what that smile says, relax, sweetheart. “Besides, it’s not how long it takes, it’s who’s taking you.”

That’s a quote from something. “Is that a quote from something?”

Changkyun hesitates, then breaks into a toothy grin, shoulders hunching up since he’s embarrassed. “Marilyn Monroe movie. _Some Like it Hot_.”

“I haven’t seen that one,” Kihyun lies. It’s one of Wonho’s favorites, he’s seen it about five times. “Is it any good?”

“It’s _iconic_,” Changkyun says emphatically. “It’s not pre-code, but it is pretty, uh, explicit. I mean, it’s got Marilyn.”

“What’s it about?” Kihyun asks, and they set off down the street to the train station, walking close enough that their shoulders brush. They’re very nearly the same height, Changkyun might have an inch on Kihyun but that might just be his shoes, and each time their arms bump together Changkyun’s breath half-stutters.

“I could tell you,” Changkyun says, “_or_ we could watch it. If you want?”

“We can rent it from Blockbuster,” Kihyun says with a cheeky smile and Changkyun laughs, shaking his head wistfully.

“God, I wish. Was— was that a yes, though?”

He’s a child. He’s literally a child. Kihyun imagines what their conversations would have been like if they’d met fifteen years ago; Kihyun even more uptight than he is now — before the chaotic influence Minhyuk and Wonho and Hyungwon had on his personality — and naturally suspicious of everyone and everything, cards kept very close, and Changkyun, hothouse-nurtured and sensitive and eager for friendship, for company, for someone to join him on his throne, to save him from his boredom. Poor little rich boy. “Yes,” Kihyun says, smiling over at him briefly as they go down the steps into the subway station.

“Cool,” Changkyun says, can’t stop smiling again, and they swipe their metro cards and wait on the platform for the train. 

“Tell me the plot, though,” Kihyun requests, softer, coming up closer to stand by him as the train going in the opposite direction pulls into the station, making the hair on the back of Changkyun’s head flutter up for a moment. “Or— it doesn’t have to be the actual plot. Make it up as you go along. Just tell me something.”

He leaves unspoken that he just wants to hear Changkyun’s thoughts because he likes his voice; he’s sure that Changkyun can glean that much for himself, even with his limited intellect. And it seems to work, Changkyun’s cheeks go red, he lifts a hand to rub at the tip of his big nose. “Um,” he says, flustered but happy. “So— okay. So the movie starts in Chicago, there’s these two musicians, a saxophonist—” He just _has _to use that word, can’t just say saxophone player, and he has to pronounce it _sux-AW-phonist_, Kihyun’s never heard anything more pretentious in his life— “and a bassist, and it’s the middle of Prohibition—” Not true, it takes place in 1929, more than halfway through Prohibition— “and they get caught in the middle of the Valentine’s Day Massacre, so they have to escape to Florida, but here’s the catch: they have to pretend to be women. On the train to Florida, they meet Sugar Kane, who—”

This continues for some time, even as they board the G train to north Brooklyn. He’s not bad at summarizing it, leaving out just enough to keep the plot interesting and making himself laugh as he remembers the funnier moments, and Kihyun watches him, listens to him, holding his elbow lightly to keep from swaying away too far with the motion of the train. 

“…and then— well, the ending is a little dramatic, and I won’t be able to do it justice, so you’ll just have to wait and see,” Changkyun finishes, out of breath and waiting, pink-cheeked and nervous, for Kihyun to praise him.

“Your talents are wasted on Big Pharma,” Kihyun says, smiling up at him. “You should write the blurbs for the film section of the New Yorker.”

“Shh,” Changkyun says, the tips of his ears red. 

“I mean it,” Kihyun laughs. “I’d love to watch that with you. I mean, I was already looking for an excuse to ask you out for a third date, but—”

“Oh,” Changkyun says, blushing even harder. “You were?”

Kihyun nods, letting his expression go self-conscious, shy just like Changkyun is. “Is that okay?”

“I just… was also planning something,” Changkyun admits, which is _beyond _surprising. “There’s a gallery opening I got invited to, and I was wondering if you’d want to go with me, maybe.”

The third date is important. Kihyun is going to sleep with him on the third date. That’s always been the plan. Inviting him over to watch a movie is pretty standard as far as slutty third dates go, but an art gallery, Kihyun has to grudgingly admit, is better. There’s the pretense of propriety, of making an appearance somewhere, of doing something high-brow and intellectual, like this isn’t just a countdown to when they get to slip away to a dark corner and get hot and heavy. Waiting until the third date shows commitment, shows serious intentions, not just wanting to work out some kind of brief desire and then go their separate ways, and yes, going to a gallery opening is more in line with those ideals. Unbeknownst to Changkyun, Changkyun is working with him, working in Kihyun’s favor, but Kihyun doesn’t have time to feel grateful for the help, he’s just adjusting his meticulously planned schedule.

“That sounds nice,” Kihyun says, making the snap decision to agree. “When is it?” 

“Next weekend,” Changkyun says. So crestfallen because it means he might have to wait more than a week to see Kihyun again. “Are you free?”

Kihyun takes a moment to act like he’s running through his mental calendar, then nods. “Yeah, I am. What sort of art is it?”

“Uh… well, in college, she was doing a lot of post-representationist stuff,” Changkyun says, which is definitely not a word. “No idea what she’s up to now. I guess we’ll see.”

So Changkyun is bringing him to meet one of his college friends or acquaintances. How interesting. “I guess we will,” Kihyun agrees with a smile, then— “Oh, _fuck_, this is our stop!”

“Fuck!” Changkyun laughs and Kihyun grabs him by the wrist, hauling him out of the train just before the doors can slide closed. Then they’re breathless on the platform, laughing, as the train rushes away behind them. It’s really not that funny, not funny at all, but they’re both giddy, and just like they’d hugged earlier, no one takes the de facto lead on sliding their hands down until they’re gripped, it just happens, Changkyun’s broad palm pressed to Kihyun’s far narrower one, their fingers linking tight with Kihyun’s thumb on the outside. Somehow the laughter dies down but they’re still smiling, and Kihyun leans closer, their shoulders knocking together affectionately, and doesn’t let go of Changkyun’s hand. 

“Come on,” he says, softer, and Changkyun would follow him anywhere, anywhere, but for now all he has to do is follow him to this bar.

They’re still holding hands on the street. Kihyun made himself blush to match Changkyun, so they’re pink-cheeked and bashful as they cross the street. Changkyun’s whole hand is sweaty. Kihyun wants to cut both their arms off at the elbow to prevent this from ever having to happen again. But blessedly, they’re at the bar soon enough, and Kihyun has to let go so he can open the door. There’s already music coming from the back, the bar itself is barely lively, and Kihyun glances back at Changkyun.

“Do you want me to go see if there’s seats for the band, and you can get drinks?” he suggests. 

Changkyun nods, his dark hair bouncing. “What do you want?”

“G&T,” Kihyun says, and smiles up at him, pressing his delicate-fingered hand to the crook of Changkyun’s elbow. “Thanks. Hurry.”

Changkyun’s dimples are so deep and his eyes are so warm, so adoring, and he nods and heads for the bar as Kihyun goes through the back to the smaller, over-furnished space tucked away in the garden. The band’s in full swing, a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, a shaggy-haired vocalist with a keytar. Kihyun finds a table near the exit, somewhat more secluded, but the music is still loud, amplifier feedback noisy to the point that he can’t make out any words. 

“Hey,” Changkyun says right in his ear two songs later and Kihyun twists up and around to see him, pushing the other chair out for Changkyun. “Who are we listening to?”

“I think the guitarist said they were called… Tooth?” Kihyun says, shrugging, and accepts his drink from Changkyun as he sits.

“_Tooth_,” Changkyun repeats, amused. “I hate Brooklyn.”

“So do I,” Kihyun says and they exchange smiles, then take preliminary sips of their drinks.

If either of them wanted to say something else, they’re no longer able to, because Tooth start up their next song, and this one has twice as much wailing as the previous one, and trying to talk over it would be pointless. Changkyun scoots his chair closer to Kihyun’s, probably trying to be subtle about it, but the legs of the chair scrape dissonantly across the floor — not even the shriek of Tooth’s guitarist can conceal it, and Changkyun blushes, trying and failing to hide behind Kihyun, who just sips his gin and tonic and smiles to himself.

“I never really got into screamo,” Changkyun says during a brief respite between songs. “Not for lack of trying, though. I dated a girl who was really, _really _into screamo, and she did her best to convert me, but the hardest I could ever go was old-school punk.”

So he’s bi, then. Kihyun tries to picture Changkyun with a woman and nearly chokes on his drink, feeling the tonic water burning at the back of his throat from how hard he’s trying not to spit-take with laughter all over the couple sitting in front of them. “Well— I did warn you that it might not be good, it’s impossible to predict,” he says. 

“It’s not _bad_,” Changkyun says pensively, and then Tooth bring out a _second _drum kit, which doesn’t bode well.

Three more songs later, Kihyun’s ears are starting to ring a little, and it’s time for another drink. He’s down to just ice, and since the song is wrapping up, he leans in closer to talk to Changkyun. “Want me to go get you a refill?”

“Hm? Oh, I can go, you’re kinda… stuck,” Changkyun points out, which is true, Kihyun’s in the corner and Changkyun would have to get up to let him out anyway.

“Attention, all you fucking beautiful people in here, this is our _best _song,” wails the lead singer of Tooth, and Kihyun rolls his eyes, putting his hand on Changkyun’s forearm to keep him from going.

“Wait until this one’s done. It’s their best song, you know,” he informs him dryly, and Changkyun laughs, turning in his chair so they’ll be tucked closer together.

Tooth’s best song is horrible. Even Changkyun and his dubious preferences seem to think so. By the second chorus, Changkyun leans in closer, and he must not want to raise his voice, because he’s getting close, real close, lips at Kihyun’s ear again. “What’s the over-under on them sweeping at the Grammys this year?”

Kihyun can’t quite bring himself to laugh when Changkyun is so near. “They have my vote, at least,” he murmurs and looks up, slow, through his eyelashes. Changkyun is very close. 

“Mm,” Changkyun says, and Kihyun can’t help himself and kisses him, even though it’s too soon, it wasn’t on the schedule to kiss this early in the date, but Changkyun’s mouth is warm just like the rest of him. Changkyun breathes out against Kihyun and his hand comes up to rest on the back of his chair for stability, while Kihyun kisses him again, lingering, slow, the harsh bass notes of Tooth’s best song resonating through his sternum, through his throat, into Changkyun’s lips. 

Kihyun hasn’t had enough to drink to be able to enjoy this, but he lets Changkyun try to slip him some tongue, even though he’s as hesitant and clumsy about that as he is about everything else. Kihyun moves a hand to the base of Changkyun’s skull, fingers sliding into his thick hair, which is much softer than it looks, and Changkyun opens up for him just like that, letting Kihyun lick inside.

The song ends. Kihyun pulls away but leaves his hand where it is, and Changkyun’s mouth is half-open, kiss-warmed, red. His eyes are heavy, slowly focusing on Kihyun. “What was that for?” he whispers, hoarse.

“You,” Kihyun says. 

Changkyun’s blush blooms across his entire face and he’s visibly so happy, so embarrassed, his lips are still wet from the gentle way Kihyun sucked on them for half a second. “I’m— I’ll go get— be right back,” he mumbles, grabs their empty glasses, and makes a quick escape.

Kihyun laughs very quietly to himself, biting his lip as he watches him go. He couldn’t be more pleased with Changkyun’s idiot trusting nature. Honestly, Changkyun is trusting to the point that maybe Kihyun should worry that he’s been kissing plenty of semi-strangers in bars, letting them all manipulate him however they like, but his kiss was so unpracticed, all raw emotion and excitement, unrefined. Kihyun has nothing to worry about. He checks the time: it’s barely nine. It’ll only take half an hour to get home from this part of Brooklyn, so although Kihyun’s tolerance for Changkyun is beginning to wear thin, unfortunately he can’t use the excuse that he needs to get to bed soon just yet. 

Tooth’s music is getting better, honestly, or maybe that’s just the gin. Changkyun comes back with their drinks and he’s still red and skittish, but Kihyun smiles at him normally, breezy, relaxed, and accepts his drink. “They’re just doing covers now,” he informs him, raising his voice so they don’t have to lean in closer again — that first kiss was acceptable, as far as infractions of the schedule go, but making out through the rest of this show would most decidedly not be. 

“Oh, good,” Changkyun says, distracted every time Kihyun moves, and Kihyun smiles to himself, crossing his legs at the ankles and keeping his eyes on the band. He feels a light touch along his shoulderblades and realizes Changkyun has draped an arm over the back of Kihyun’s chair. How juvenile. Kihyun tilts just slightly, letting Changkyun tuck him into his side, and sips his drink.

Changkyun doesn’t move his arm for the next twenty minutes — it must have fallen asleep. Tooth are currently making Take On Me sound like a funeral dirge, and Kihyun is thinking about the work he should be doing right now, the emails he didn’t reply to earlier. Changkyun, meanwhile, is breathing, the soft rise and fall of his chest tangible against Kihyun’s bony shoulder. He’s warm. Kihyun is very nearly comfortable, everything is paid for, his ears will be ringing for the next two days at this rate, how can he excuse his way out of this one? He and Changkyun are just _sitting _there, not even talking, just wasting time. 

The bassist of Tooth, speaking in a heavy Italian accent, announces — or maybe threatens? — that they have three songs left in their set for tonight, and Kihyun yawns, covering his mouth with a polite hand. 

“Oh no!” Changkyun says. Oh, _yes. _“Are you tired? Shit, you have work tomorrow, right?”

Most people that aren’t unsupervised heirs running wild do, yes. “Yeah, but I’m okay,” Kihyun assures him, blinking harder to reverse the effects of drowsiness. 

But it’s too late, Changkyun’s already worried. “No, I don’t want to keep you out too late,” he says, drawing his arm back from around Kihyun’s chair. With a considerable amount of pleasure, Kihyun notes the way he winces in discomfort, curling his hand into a fist a few times to restart the bloodflow to his fingers. 

“I guess it is a long ride home,” Kihyun agrees very reluctantly. Thank fuck. He uncrosses his ankles and sits up straighter, a few vertebrae in his back popping as he stretches. “I’m sorry.”

“Not at all,” Changkyun reassures, standing up, giving Kihyun room to do the same. “Are we taking the train?”

Kihyun nods, getting out his phone to check the route. They’ll probably have to go their separate ways here, which is fine, but—

Changkyun leans in to peer over his shoulder, still so shy about physical proximity but clearly getting bolder. “Oh, that’s on my way, too,” he observes, happy. “Mind if I tag along?”

“I’d mind it if you didn’t,” Kihyun answers, smiling at him, and they somehow manage to squeeze their way out of the bar, which has gotten significantly fuller over the course of the hour and a half they’ve been there, and onto the street.

This time, it’s more natural for them to hold hands as they walk, and the night air is cooler, so one would _think _that Changkyun’s hand would be less sweaty than it had been earlier, but it is not. Kihyun swallows down his distaste and slows his typical walking pace just like he knew he’d have to. “They do trivia nights twice a week,” Changkyun says. “The bartender told me about it.”

“Oh, yeah? I think I’ve heard about that, but I’ve never been,” Kihyun says.

“We should go sometime,” Changkyun says. So that’s why he was so quiet for the latter half of Tooth’s set; he was working up the courage to issue this invitation. “I think we’d make a great team.”

Kihyun ducks his head to badly hide his smile, his fingers slipping along Changkyun’s. “I agree,” he murmurs. “That sounds fun.”

“Okay, it’s a date,” Changkyun says, so gleeful about calling it a _date_ that it’s almost like he hasn’t been on two dates with Kihyun already, like they haven’t planned a third for next week. Everything is so new to him, like he’s a duckling imprinting on the whole world. Maybe that’s just what happens as a result of being raised in extreme wealth — he’s had a taste of just about everything but life.

“Okay,” Kihyun agrees, and they board the train, Kihyun shivering slightly in the cold and Changkyun taking both his hands in his own to warm them up.

Kihyun won’t kiss him again until it’s time to kiss goodnight. A goodnight kiss was always the plan. He can tell Changkyun wants to kiss more, though, he keeps looking hopefully at Kihyun’s lips, sometimes he can’t look away from them long enough to reply when it’s his turn to talk. Kihyun could get used to this, having this much power over him, but constantly prompting him to answer whatever question Kihyun just asked is tiring, and he’s not here to babysit him through a social interaction. But thankfully, blessedly, the subway ride takes less time than it took them to walk to the subway in the first place, and although Changkyun knows by now that Kihyun lives in Chelsea, he has the tact to know when to wait, and therefore doesn’t offer to walk Kihyun home.

But they disembark together, because Changkyun has to change lines to get to Soho from here. “Next weekend, right?” Kihyun clarifies as they step out onto the platform. 

Changkyun nods. That sweater is very silly, and when they live together, Kihyun is going to steal it from him, either to wear himself or to “lose” on the way to the dry cleaners’. Could go either way, at this point. “I’ll text you where and when, once I track down the invite,” he says, sheepish.

“Okay,” Kihyun says and steps closer to him. God — it’s like an algorithm, how instant and reflexive it is, input leading to immediate output: Kihyun getting close means Changkyun goes very still and quiet, excited and nervous and willing, up for anything. “Get home safe. Thanks for the pie, and the drinks.”

“Thanks for the company,” Changkyun says, a rasp to his voice that wasn’t there before.

Kihyun kisses him. Smaller, briefer than the first time. But firm, final. A stamped imprint on the wax seal that binds a love letter shut. “Good night,” he says and kisses him again. “Da mi basia mille.”

Changkyun makes a squashed noise. “_Kihyun_.”

“Good night,” Kihyun whispers. One more kiss. The weave of Changkyun’s campy goldfinch sweater is very fine, and Kihyun smoothes his hands over Changkyun’s shoulders. 

“Good night,” Changkyun murmurs, so low, and before Kihyun can fully step away, he catches him in another kiss, that sensitive, expressive mouth still so warm against Kihyun’s. 

Kihyun has hit his hard five-kisses-at-one-time limit. He pulls away, smiling his most private smile, and flutters his fingers at Changkyun in another small goodbye. “See you soon,” he says, and turns and goes up the stairs out of the station, being sure to remember to look back over his shoulder like he can’t help himself, just one last time, just wanting to see Changkyun one more time before he goes. Changkyun is beaming after him, dimpled cheeks pink, kissed lips red, and he looks so _happy_, so _stupid. _

Is there really a difference? Between happiness and stupidity? In Changkyun’s case, Kihyun doesn’t think there is. 

The kiss changed things, clearly. Kihyun anticipated this change and is glad that reality aligns with his expectations. Now Changkyun texts him good morning — at very inconsistent times, 11 on Friday but 8 on Saturday — and asks, mid-day, what he’s up to. Kihyun really couldn’t have gotten luckier with his selection: not only is Changkyun a trusting, magnanimous imbecile, but he doesn’t text much more than this. _Could _Kihyun have put up with a veritable millennial, someone constantly plugged in, doing Facebook check-ins and Instagram live-streams and a never-ending flow of amorous text messages all day long? Sure, but he’d really prefer not to, and thankfully, he doesn’t have to. He texts Changkyun back when prompted, and asks him on Tuesday evening to send the time and location of the gallery opening just so Kihyun can make sure he won’t have any work obligations that night.

It’s on Friday, Changkyun replies. Sure, that works. The gallery is, in fact, in Chelsea. That works even better. Kihyun will have a glass of champagne then allow Changkyun to walk him home, then invite him up. He’d always intended to have it go that way, to have them go back to his place and not Changkyun’s, because it’s so _Pride and Prejudice _to only consummate after seeing the big house (or, in this case, the big bachelor pad in Soho), and that would reveal that Kihyun just wanted to see what money he was up against. No, they’ll go to Kihyun’s. He has enough time before Friday to make it presentable. He rearranges his DVD collection and buys a poster to adorn his otherwise mostly-bare walls. 

Is Kihyun looking forward to sleeping with Changkyun? No, but he always intended to have sex with whatever mark he chose — rich men may all be stupid, but they’re not _that _stupid. He knows how it’ll go, anyway. If it really is Changkyun’s first time, he’ll fumble and fidget and apologize a lot, then finish within 30 seconds, and then Kihyun can get used to just lying back and waiting for the checks to roll in. It’s a necessary evil, the sex. Another box to tick. Kihyun’s pencil is at the ready. His outfit is selected. He has condoms and lube and clean sheets on his bed, not that Changkyun will appreciate any of his efforts. It’ll be over soon, Kihyun hopes. 

How time flies when Kihyun is living date to date. On Friday, he goes home after work, changes into his most subtly seductive outfit, then heads for the gallery, which is a ten-minute walk away. Kihyun doesn’t do seduction — or, at least, he’s never had to, all his past relationships started on far more equal footing — but he’s sure Changkyun will appreciate it, the flashes of wrist and collarbone that his boat-neck shirt show off, and Kihyun is planning on touching his arm, laughing at his jokes, watching him with sparkly eyes, until Changkyun can’t take it anymore, hot under the collar and ready for Kihyun to put him out of his misery.

For once, Kihyun is there first. Changkyun texts him, frantic, that he’s running late, and although tardiness is one of Kihyun’s least favorite traits in a man, he grits his teeth and reassures him that it’s okay, not to worry, it’s not that cold outside. Changkyun’s not that late, anyway, and Kihyun can still feel his fingertips by the time Changkyun is running up to the gallery, pink-cheeked, flustered.

“I’m so sorry, I just got caught up at work,” Changkyun says, so out of breath, so worried he’s displeased him, and Kihyun shakes his head, smiling at him and reaching up to smooth down his hair where it’s gotten rumpled from his hurry.

“You’re not that late, it’s okay,” Kihyun says, and hugging when they see each other is a thing they do now, so he puts his arms around Changkyun’s shoulders for a brief, warm moment and feels Changkyun’s breath brushing over his ear. “Should we go in, are they expecting you?”

“Well, she wouldn’t wait for me to start, but yeah,” Changkyun says and checks his Rolex (_finally_, some showing off!). “Thanks for coming with me, by the way. I hope it’s not super boring.”

Kihyun, surprised, gives him his prettiest, pearliest smile, slipping his arm through Changkyun’s as Changkyun opens the door for them. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

“And if it is boring,” Changkyun adds, lowering his voice because there’s someone giving a speech of some sort inside, “there’ll be free champagne, so.”

Kihyun bites his lip, leaning affectionately into Changkyun’s side. He can’t deny that he’s getting a thrill from this, being a rich boy’s arm candy to a stuffy gallery event, and he holds his posture straighter, lifts his chin more. A woman in a grey silk dress with blood-red accents is speaking in a throaty voice about the importance of Art in her life, Kihyun can hear the capital letter every time she pronounces the word, and Kihyun curls his hands more around Changkyun’s arm, seeking warmth.

“That’s Connie,” Changkyun whispers. “I’ll introduce you when she’s done talking.”

“This is all her stuff?” Kihyun whispers back, glancing around the walls of the gallery with incredible disinterest. “It’s very…”

“I know, right? I love her art,” Changkyun says, which has nothing in common with what Kihyun was planning to end his sentence with, so he just hums very vaguely in response and nudges Changkyun’s ribs with his elbow as a passing tuxedo-clad waiter offers them half-full glasses of champagne from a platter.

Champagne in hand, the talk is a lot more palatable, and it seems like Connie is winding down her explanations of her various artistic techniques anyway. Kihyun isn’t paying much attention, looking at the paintings instead, and now he sees what Changkyun meant by “post-representationalist”: every painting features at least one decently-rendered feature, be it a human head or an apple or a house, and the rest of the canvas is filled by muddy, incomprehensible smudges. It probably sends some sort of message, but Kihyun’s never had time for trite painterly subtext, especially at the hands of someone who went to Columbia.

“How was your day?” Changkyun murmurs in Kihyun’s ear. He must be bored by the speech, too, which is amusing.

“Fine,” Kihyun breathes. “I’m glad it’s the weekend, though.”

“Same here,” Changkyun says, as though he’s been working hard all week, then leans back away so he can clap politely at the conclusion of Connie’s narrative. Kihyun doesn’t want to let him go just yet, so he takes him by the arm again, tilting his head to the side.

“Can we look around first? I want to know what she’s all about before you introduce me,” he explains, and Changkyun is enchanted by this proposition, nodding all glowy-eyed at him and guiding Kihyun to the nearest wall to see the painting from up-close.

“What do you think?” Changkyun says. Kihyun almost laughs at his tone, then realizes he’s not joking, he really wants Kihyun’s opinion. 

“Well, she’s no Renoir, but I see what she’s going for,” Kihyun says. “I like the color. Reminds me of my kitchen.”

“Your kitchen?” Changkyun repeats, his eyebrows raising, and Kihyun reminds himself to be _nice_, be _kind_, be inviting and warm and whimsical and everything Kihyun hates most in the world.

“A space for communion,” he explains smoothly. “Someplace warm and nourishing, but it’s got knives in it, too. You know?”

Changkyun is looking at him like he just reinvented the wheel. “Yes,” he says slowly. “Yeah, I totally see what you mean. I’ve never thought of it that way— I’ve seen this one before, and it always just makes me sad.”

“That, too,” Kihyun agrees, smiling softly, and with a light pull on Changkyun’s arm, keeps them walking through the gallery.

Kihyun has to be careful here. His opinions on art are pretty unyielding, but this is Changkyun’s college friend, he doesn’t want to hurt any feelings. So he lets Changkyun explain the next two paintings to him, bites his tongue, sips his champagne to keep his mouth occupied when he really, _really _wants to say something about how clearly she and Changkyun both lack a basic concept of color theory beyond “cool tones = sad, warm tones = happy.” 

That champagne goes by quickly. “Do you want another one?” Changkyun offers, and Kihyun nods, looking around for a waiter. But it seems they’ve all vanished and they’ll have to go to the small bar on the opposite side of the room instead. “No, stay here, stay with this.” (Kihyun has been pretending to be very affected by a painting of a rocking horse.) “I’ll be right back, okay?”

“Okay,” Kihyun smiles, letting Changkyun take his empty glass, and turns back around to stare blankly at the painting. It’s called ‘Rosebud,’ which indicates to Kihyun that not only does Connie not have the emotional range to produce meaningful art, she’s also never actually seen _Citizen Kane _from start to finish. Ah, there are few things Kihyun likes better than feeling superior to pretentious people, so he’s having quite a fine time indeed, as boring as this is.

Changkyun is gone for a while. Eventually, Kihyun, bored to the point that he’d rather have Changkyun by his side praising him and marveling at him, looks back over the gallery and spots Changkyun talking with Connie. They’re standing fairly close, and as he watches, Connie lays a hand on Changkyun’s arm and leaves it there, tilts her head back to laugh at something Changkyun says, nods along a little too eagerly as he keeps talking.

Oh. So she’s not just a friend, not just an acquaintance, but they were _involved _in some way. At the very least, one or both of them wanted to be involved. Kihyun’s eyes narrow and he starts walking over. What is Changkyun playing at, bringing him to an event that’s celebrating his ex? That’s just bad manners, and he feels slighted. Yes, he wanted to be arm candy, but he’s also going to be the main course for the rest of Changkyun’s brief life, and he will _not _be trifled with.

“There you are!” Changkyun has the absolute gall to say as he sees Kihyun walking up. Kihyun quickly affixes a neutral, polite smile on his face and accepts the new glass of champagne that Changkyun is holding out to him. “I finally managed to get Connie alone. Seems like everybody’s trying to talk to her.”

“I don’t blame them,” Kihyun says with an even more neutral, even more polite smile for Connie, which she reciprocates. “Her work certainly raises quite a few questions.”

“This is Kihyun,” Changkyun says, and Connie and Kihyun shake hands. Her grip is firm but Kihyun isn’t intimidated, and when Changkyun oh-so-subtly slips his arm around Kihyun’s waist so they’ll stand closer, he radiates smugness. 

“Changkyun just told me what you said about _Delilah_,” Connie says, gesturing back to the first painting Kihyun had commented on. “I must say, I appreciate your perspective— nobody’s ever compared it to a kitchen before.”

“My kitchen is smaller than that canvas, and yet it has just as many uses,” Kihyun says, sipping his champagne. “Very courageous work.”

Connie, confused, just flashes a blank smile at Kihyun, and Kihyun, victorious, leans into Changkyun’s side. He thrives in the realm of the backhanded, and when Changkyun adjusts his hold on Kihyun’s waist he feels a flash of annoyance at Changkyun for putting him in this situation in the first place. Yes, Kihyun managed to hold his own against this frosty, self-important _artiste_, but does Changkyun treat all of his third-dates like this? Not that Changkyun can make it to a third date with just anyone, but still. What if Kihyun hadn’t been able to come up with a quick comeback? Was he meant to just stand there, humiliated by the closeness Changkyun and Connie clearly share, a stranger in paradise? Kihyun’s not _jealous_. This is all artificial — he has no reason to be jealous. He’s just offended that Changkyun has perceived him to be so easy-going and weak-willed as to _enjoy_, or at the very least not mind, being thrown head-first into the ex-lover pool. And finally, someone else approaches Connie to talk to her about her masterpieces, and she distractedly says, “Thank you for coming, Changkyun,” before turning away to attend to her new conversation. 

Wonderful. Kihyun takes another sip. “Should we go look at the rest?” he asks, smiling lightly at Changkyun.

Changkyun blinks quickly, eyes focusing on Kihyun, his typical stupid expression as stupid as ever. He always looks like his mind is in another room and he’s trying in vain to call it back over to come and make small talk. “Definitely,” he says, curling his hand around Kihyun’s hip, and they leave Connie alone and return to the paintings.

They make the rounds in about ten minutes. Changkyun asks Kihyun all about his art preferences, and Kihyun has to do some fast thinking, feign a fondness for the Impressionists. Changkyun, Oscar Wilde wannabe that he is, loves the Pre-Raphaelites. They talk about the merits of modern art more generally, and Changkyun makes some grand, wild statements about the objectivity of value — where does he come up with this stuff? — and Kihyun hmms and nods along, agreeing with him where it counts, keeping quiet where it doesn’t. Even sneaks in a few jabs at Andy Warhol, when he can. And they agree that performance art can be very beautiful, as well as that just about anything could be performance art. 

“My apartment has a view directly onto a bike rack that I think is cursed,” Kihyun says. Changkyun’s eyes are so lit up, and he’s had some champagne, too, he keeps looking at Kihyun’s mouth. This’ll be a breeze. “Either that, or it’s performance art. You should see the way people treat that thing. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that it was an installation piece the whole time.”

Changkyun laughs the laugh of someone so profoundly charmed, completely under Kihyun’s spell. “Really? What do people do to it?”

Kihyun spins some beautiful, eccentric yarn about multiple bike locks, punctured tires, late-night out-loud bargaining with the bike rack itself as though that’ll keep it more secure. Changkyun is enthralled, standing motionless in the middle of the art gallery and listening to Kihyun, and when Kihyun shrugs and finishes, “But that was the only time I ever saw it make someone _cry_. I’ve only lived in this apartment for two years, though, there’s still a chance it’ll happen again,” Changkyun shakes his head very slowly, amazed.

“You could make anything sound interesting,” he says. “Your perspective on things is just so— so unique.”

Kihyun smiles, blushes, does everything Changkyun wants him to do. “It’s not all that. There’s just not much else interesting in my life, so. I make do.”

“Like, now I want to see it, I want to see if it’s cursed,” Changkyun says. Kihyun’s breath jumps into his throat — there’s his in. “But I don’t have a bike with me. Do you think it’d work with something else? I could probably leave a shoe?”

“We can try,” Kihyun agrees gamely. “I do live right near here.” That’s an opening. An overture. The rest of the opera will follow, if only Changkyun says—

“Okay,” Changkyun nods. He looks around, checks his watch again. “Yeah, I think we put in enough time, we can go.”

The curtain rises and the players take the stage. “Okay,” Kihyun smiles, biting his lip and letting his blush get warmer. “Do we need to say bye to Connie? She was so nice.” She was not, and neither was Kihyun, but no harm, no foul.

“Nah, she’s fine,” Changkyun says and takes Kihyun’s glass from him, setting it on a small pedestal that’s definitely not intended to just hold empty glasses, but it’s like they can’t get out of there fast enough, smiling coy smiles at each other as Kihyun buttons up his coat and Changkyun leads them out of the gallery.

But they’re shy again when they’re out on the street. “It’s this way,” Kihyun says and gently takes Changkyun by the hand. “I really think I talked it up too much, it’s really just a bike rack.”

“I wanna see it anyway,” Changkyun says, dopey, his voice low and happy, and Kihyun keeps smiling until his cheeks hurt again, which he’s been doing a lot lately.

That was far faster than Kihyun had expected: they’d met at 8, and it’s just past 9 now. Even still, Changkyun is going to have to spend the night. “This looks like a really nice neighborhood to live in,” Changkyun comments. Tonight, Kihyun is letting Changkyun keep his thumb on the outside of their hands, giving him some semblance of control, and Changkyun’s grip is warm and damp, as usual. Kihyun gives his sweaty hand a very small squeeze and nods, glancing around at the familiar trees, the bodega on the corner, the gentrified walk-ups, the subway grates, the rusted numbers on the buildings. Hates every inch of it. But has to smile, has to nod, and look at it with Changkyun’s eyes, see the charm where Kihyun sees nothing but misery. He forces himself to keep smiling, glancing briefly at Changkyun.

“It is,” he agrees. “Plus I’m really close to my office. I walk every day, and I’m never late.” He still can’t believe Changkyun just introduced him to an ex and didn’t even have the decency to warn him in advance that that was the case. The worst part is — Kihyun can’t even ask him about it, can’t confront him, because then he’d seem crazy, he’d seem possessive and controlling, and it’s only their third date. Is this manipulation from Changkyun? Was he trying to make Kihyun jealous? Obviously it didn’t work, and obviously he’s not smart enough to orchestrate any manipulations of his own, but Kihyun is still seething quietly to himself, even as their linked hands sway between them while they walk.

Changkyun is saying something about how he wishes he lived closer to work, he’s late all the time — _yeah, I know, you fucking louche _— and Kihyun makes sympathetic noises. The street is quieter than it usually is on a Friday night, so they’re really just murmuring to each other in soft evening voices, Kihyun explaining exactly what it is he has to do at work, technical gibberish he knows Changkyun won’t understand, Changkyun impressed by this as he is by every other thing Kihyun has ever said. The air has gotten colder and Kihyun has to walk closer to Changkyun, and Changkyun doesn’t seem to mind — he’s probably seconds away from offering Kihyun his coat.

“Here it is,” Kihyun says, gesturing to the bike rack.

They look at it for a minute.

“It’s a bike rack,” Changkyun agrees.

“What were you expecting?” Kihyun says, hiding a smile. “Did you think I was lying?”

“No, I believe you about it, I just expected to feel its energy,” Changkyun says and lets go of Kihyun’s hand so he can step closer to it and lean down to examine it more closely.

Kihyun, acting like he’s charmed by this overgrown toddler with no impulse control just because he’s playing along with some stupid story Kihyun came up for him about a _bike rack_, bites his lip, smiles, puts his hands in his pockets and shivers. “Feel anything?”

“Not yet,” Changkyun says, so serious, and straightens back up. “Maybe it only works when there’s something attached to it.”

“I don’t have a bike,” Kihyun apologizes. “Even if I did, I wouldn’t risk leaving it there.”

They keep looking at it as though it’s going to do something interesting, even though it’s a fucking bike rack, and Kihyun sighs, looking back over his shoulder at the window that he knows is his.

“It looks different from my window, I think. More sinister,” he says.

“Oh, yeah?” Changkyun says.

Kihyun waits. And waits for another second, and Changkyun glances at him, and Kihyun curls his right hand into a fist inside his pocket, feels his nails dig into his palm. “I think so. You’d better come up and see for yourself, though, to prove I’m not crazy.”

“You’re not crazy,” Changkyun says, his whole face _radiant_.

Kihyun takes his hand out of his pocket and reaches for Changkyun’s fingers. Changkyun meets him halfway and they just tangle together at the first knuckle, nice and easy, and Kihyun leads Changkyun across the street, unlocks his front door, takes him up the stairs, which creak under their footsteps. He’s not ashamed of Changkyun seeing his place, although maybe if this were real, he would be. The paint is peeling above his doorknob, the lightbulb in the stairwell has been burnt out for weeks, but it’s where he lives, and if Changkyun is going to rescue him from his circumstances, he’s got to feel adequately horrified by said circumstances. Kihyun doesn’t apologize, doesn’t say “it’s kind of a mess,” doesn’t say “it must be a lot smaller than what you’re used to,” just gets out his keys and unlocks his door.

He goes in first, and Changkyun follows, and they get stuck awkwardly in Kihyun’s two-square-foot entryway, trying to shuffle around each other. “Oh— sorry,” Kihyun says, all his breath rushing out of him quickly, and tries to let Changkyun through, but then they’re just standing very close together and Changkyun tries to take off his coat but there’s not quite enough room. “The— the window’s just… over there.”

Changkyun looks, but only for a moment. Then he’s back to looking at Kihyun, and they really are very close in height, Changkyun only has to direct his eyes down just a little. “Can I tell you something?” he murmurs, in that low-low voice, and Kihyun swallows slightly, nods. “I don’t really want to see the view from your window.”

“Oh,” Kihyun says, and Changkyun presses him back against the wall and kisses him, kisses him _deep_, and Kihyun sucks on his lower lip and drags his hands up Changkyun’s arms, his strong, warm arms, starts trying to push his coat off his shoulders for him. At least they’re on the same page — Changkyun isn’t wasting any time, he’s kissing Kihyun like he’s drowning, and somehow Kihyun doesn’t mind that he’s using too much tongue because he knows that he himself is using too much of his teeth, and they’re kissing messy, Kihyun’s hands clutching in Changkyun’s hair as soon as the coat falls to the ground. 

That coat definitely costs more than Kihyun’s monthly rent. Kihyun pulls Changkyun in closer to him, shudders when he feels one of Changkyun’s burning-hot hands on his waist, pushing up his shirt, and Changkyun steps on the coat like it doesn’t even _matter_, like he has twenty of these coats at home and if one has a shoe print on it it won’t matter at all, and Kihyun moans and tilts his head to the other side and dives in, licking into Changkyun’s mouth, urgent, pressing. 

Changkyun’s hand is fully up Kihyun’s shirt by now, clumsy and eager just like the rest of him, and Kihyun wraps his arms around his shoulders so tightly, gasping into his mouth, and Changkyun answers him with a rumble so low in his chest — Kihyun wants to make him whine. That’s his new goal, that’s suddenly all he cares about, and he nips at his lower lip, pulls Changkyun in so close until Changkyun is pressing him so tight against the wall, so tight that he can’t breathe, and the force of it leaves Kihyun’s thin wall vibrating behind them. Changkyun kisses like a schoolboy, no finesse, just desperation, and Kihyun is so fucking mad at him for bringing him to meet his ex-girlfriend that he yanks at his hair a shade too hard, which doesn’t make Changkyun whine but it does make him break the kiss, his wet lips going down Kihyun’s chin, his jaw, his neck, open-mouthed adoring kisses wherever he can fit them.

“You’re so beautiful,” Changkyun says hoarsely, and Kihyun clutches at his shoulders, tilts his head back to give him room to kiss his neck, and Changkyun suckles under his ear and Kihyun shudders again.

“You are,” Kihyun disagrees, just as breathless, and he can feel it when Changkyun falters, wanting Kihyun _so _badly and not even knowing where to begin, and Kihyun pities him, this sheltered, repressed loner, never kissed like this, never touched. He tugs him back up by the hair and kisses him with everything he has, a kiss that would make Marilyn Monroe blush, sucking on Changkyun’s lips and tongue and knowing it’s messy but not caring, until his lungs are burning and Changkyun is making small, helpless noises, his hands fumbling over Kihyun’s hips, his waist, pulling him away from the wall so he can run his hands up his back, like he can’t get enough of touching him, can’t believe he gets to touch him. 

Kihyun, he has to admit, has never been kissed like this either, like the person who’s kissing him will die if they stop. It’s like Changkyun is standing on top of a burning building and Kihyun is the rope thrown down from the helicopter above, and Changkyun is grabbing him, grasping him, begging him to stay right there. It’s so different from the restrained, shy way Changkyun had kissed back at the bar that Kihyun is caught off-guard, forgets to think about it and just feels _good_, Changkyun’s mouth hot on his own, immediate and heavy and plush, Kihyun kissing him back and letting Changkyun pull the jacket off Kihyun’s shoulders and toss it aside. If Kihyun lets himself think, he’ll notice that now _his _jacket is on the floor and _he’s_ not a multimillionaire with dozens of coats to spare, and then he’ll have to hang it up and frown at Changkyun for being so careless, but— this isn’t about that, he’s not thinking, and he pushes Changkyun back but keeps kissing him, guiding him across the next five feet of space until the backs of Changkyun’s knees hit Kihyun’s bed and he sits down.

It’s been so long since Kihyun has just made out with someone. And that’s exactly what they’re doing, just making out, juvenile, sensual, just licking their tongues together, Kihyun halfway in Changkyun’s lap and Changkyun’s hands still running greedy over his body. Kihyun can’t decide between combing his fingers through his hair and pressing his palms against his chest, so he does one of each. They’re both sitting on his bed in their street clothes — Kihyun changed the sheets earlier, they need to get naked _fast _or he won’t be able to distract himself from that, and he kisses Changkyun harder and hopes he gets the message. 

“Kihyun,” Changkyun says into his mouth, really breathes it, still so disbelieving. Kihyun tilts his fingers and lets his nails scratch the edge of Changkyun’s hairline and Changkyun _whines_, just like Kihyun wanted him to, a high and needy noise, but cut-off like he’s embarrassed of himself. Kihyun kisses him again, tongues along his teeth, grinds down against his hips, feels that Changkyun is getting hard. Good. It would be easy to— to touch him, rub him off over his jeans, delight in the way Changkyun would be so red and so embarrassed afterwards, put him through the humiliation of having to apologize and then endure it as Kihyun says it’s alright, and he almost does it, almost puts his hands down between them and squeezes Changkyun’s bulge. But he doesn’t. He’s being nice. Changkyun kisses reverently over Kihyun’s collarbone and Kihyun presses his face into Changkyun’s hair and gasps for breath.

Well, Changkyun doesn’t kiss like a virgin, that’s for sure. He kisses like he knows what feels good, like he knows Kihyun will like it if Changkyun kisses him soft at first and then applies more pressure, their slick lips moving together, Changkyun’s tongue lapping at the corner of Kihyun’s mouth. Kihyun’s collarbone stings just a little, making him shiver when he moves and his shirt brushes against the tender spot, and if Changkyun gave him a _hickey _like some sort of horny teenager he’ll never forgive him, but that’s a good sign, it means Changkyun wanted him marked, wanted him to be visibly spoken for, off the market. 

Kihyun tries to touch him the same way Changkyun is, his hands sliding over his head, down the sides of his neck, where he’s so warm, so strong, beating under Kihyun’s palms. Kihyun kisses him until his mouth is numb and he can’t tell whose breath is whose, and then Changkyun slides an arm around his waist and turns them over, now they’re _really _on the bed in their street clothes but Kihyun’s pants are getting too tight so hopefully he’ll get to lose them soon. Changkyun is a solid weight half on top of him, Kihyun runs his cold hands up the back of Changkyun’s shirt and makes him shudder, feels the structure of him, muscles under his skin — not quite developed, but not soft, just present, and they shift and move as Kihyun palms over his body. 

Changkyun is hard, fully, Kihyun can feel him against his thigh and presses up against him, loving it when Changkyun shudders at the friction. Kihyun’s prepared, emotionally and physically, to either top or bottom, he’ll let Changkyun cue him in on that, but what he’s _not _prepared for is Changkyun’s broad hands running up Kihyun’s thighs and his mouth, an inch away from Kihyun’s, breath skimming warm over Kihyun’s wet lips, saying, “Can I blow you?”

Kihyun is going to shallowly thrust his cock into the eager, virginal maw of New York’s upper echelon. “Yeah,” he says, and together they undo his jeans, Changkyun helps him up the bed, he loses his shirt in the process, they both do, and Changkyun is broad and neither pale nor tan in the dim light of Kihyun’s studio apartment, he’s just _there_, existing, hard in his Armani boxer briefs and staring down at Kihyun with too much reverence, too much hunger. 

They kiss again, tangling together, and it’s better now that there’s skin on skin. Kihyun can feel that Changkyun is nervous, can feel his fragile wavering heartbeat, and kisses him again, can’t stop kissing that mouth, his own lips will probably be bruised after this, but Changkyun is radiating heat down onto him and finally, finally breaks away, kisses a fast, hungry line down Kihyun’s lean torso, hesitates over the stretched fabric beneath his face. 

Kihyun reaches down, taking deep breaths, to pet his hair back from his forehead. He starts to say “It’s okay if this is your first time,” but the words die on his tongue as soon as Changkyun goes in for him— and speaking of _tongue_—

Kihyun makes an incoherent noise, arching up off the bed, hands vise-tight in Changkyun’s hair in a heartbeat, because Changkyun _swallows_ him, consumes him, his tongue— God, it’s like it’s fucking _sentient_, seeking out every single place where Kihyun is sensitive, the vein running up the underside of his dick, the ridge underneath his head, pulls off to suck and mouth so sloppy over the base, the half-inch just at the very, very base where he’s almost too sensitive, and Kihyun, electric currents jolting through him, eyes huge, moans so loud, too loud, and Changkyun licks his lips, the tip of his tongue sliding over Kihyun’s cock as he does so, his fingers coming up to rub and pull at the top of his shaft. Then Changkyun tongues up the side like a whore, Changkyun, sweet and clueless Changkyun worth $200 million, deepthroats Kihyun with so much practiced ease, swallowing around him, letting Kihyun push the head of his cock into the pliant, hot back of Changkyun’s mouth and Changkyun doesn’t gag, doesn’t sputter, Changkyun moans around him and flicks the point of his tongue into the slit at the crown of Kihyun’s dick and Kihyun _sobs_.

Changkyun’s big palms circle around the small of Kihyun’s back and he’s not holding him down, not keeping him from moving, if anything he’s trying to get more of Kihyun in his mouth although there’s nothing left to take. Kihyun’s leg involuntarily twitches up, he doesn’t know if he’s trying to push Changkyun away, make him ease up a little, or keep him exactly where he is and never let him do anything but this ever again, and Changkyun somehow manages to rub his cheek into Kihyun’s thigh while he’s licking over parts of Kihyun’s dick that Kihyun didn’t even know felt good, didn’t know he could feel like this at all, he can’t keep quiet, he’s gasping and moaning and— and almost begging, but he doesn’t know what he could beg _for_, Changkyun’s giving him everything already, and then Changkyun starts to bob his head, those expressive lips stretched and tight over Kihyun. Kihyun’s whole body shakes and he presses his head back against the pillow and struggles to breathe.

Kihyun normally doesn’t like it too wet, doesn’t like it too sloppy, but Changkyun is a _mess_, drooling all over himself, his strong eyebrows pulled together and his cheeks so flushed and his mouth _so _wet, his chin wet, Kihyun’s skin cold wherever Changkyun isn’t touching him but too hot wherever he is. He’s like a starving man, like he’s doing this for ransom, and Kihyun can’t help it, he imagines what it must be like when Changkyun is with a woman, eating her out just like this, like he’s dying for it, buried in her, and he trembles all over, bright red, squirming underneath him. It’s too much. He’ll come just like this if Changkyun doesn’t stop.

The sounds are obscene. The way Changkyun is clearly _adoring _this is even worse, he’s had a hand shoved down between himself and the bed for the past two minutes and Kihyun, when he lifts his dazed head off the pillow, sees the stilted movements of his hips as he fucks down against his own palm. He could get off just on this, Kihyun realizes, amazed. Just on giving Kihyun pleasure with his mouth. Changkyun drags his lips up the side of Kihyun’s dick, his breath so harsh, he’s just _nuzzling_ it before he tongues over the head and sucks him down his throat, and Kihyun arches up off the bed, his cock aching, his balls drawing too tight, and— “Changkyun,” he pleads. “I want— I want you to fuck me, slow down.”

“Sorry,” Changkyun gasps, oh _fuck_, his voice. It was gravel before but now it’s— now it’s a coal mine, all dark, all smoke, rough, miles below the surface. “I love doing that.”

Kihyun laughs, hysterical, his dick so hard it hurts, wet and twitching against his hip. “I can tell,” he says and holds his hands out for him. 

Changkyun moves up the bed. His face is flushed and he’s devastating, appalling, worse than ever when his eyes are lust-dark and his mouth is a little loose from Kihyun fucking his throat. He’s hesitating and Kihyun can tell that it’s because he’s shy to kiss Kihyun after having his dick in his mouth, and that’s so _sweet_, so fucking naive, and he curls his hand around the nape of Changkyun’s neck and pulls him down to kiss him, lick the taste of his pre-come out of Changkyun’s mouth. 

“You want me to fuck you?” Changkyun murmurs, and Kihyun shudders, can’t stop shaking, actually, and he _never _feels like this, small and helpless under a man, but there’s just something about Changkyun’s mouth, something about the curve of his lower lip, that makes Kihyun melt. 

“Uh huh,” Kihyun breathes, sliding his legs up around Changkyun. Changkyun kisses him, strong and sure, and pulls Kihyun up off the bed so they’ll be closer together, and one of his hands starts moving down to take Kihyun’s briefs off but then Kihyun panics, if that’s what Changkyun can do with his mouth then Kihyun can’t even imagine what he can do with his fingers, and he squirms away, getting naked himself and moving away temporarily so he can get the lube and condoms he’d prepared earlier that day.

“You’re so gorgeous,” Changkyun says, watching him, and Kihyun’s dick is still throbbing between his legs, sensitive and raw from Changkyun’s tongue, and he blushes, glancing back at him.

“You said that already,” he points out, coming back to the bed and easily guiding Changkyun over to be on his back underneath him. Changkyun is still in his jeans, but Kihyun is busy and doesn’t mind so much when Changkyun is looking at him like that. 

Changkyun shakes his head, his hands coming up to hold onto Kihyun’s hips. “I said you were so beautiful. There’s a difference.”

Kihyun blushes harder, turning the bottle of lube over so he can slick up his fingers, get comfortable in Changkyun’s lap. He— he knows he’s not for everyone, he’s short and his face is too old and too young all at once, but when Changkyun looks at him like that and says those things in that voice, he almost believes it, and he definitely feels it. He keeps looking at Changkyun as Changkyun looks at him, and as Kihyun reaches back, starts pressing himself open. He’s naked in a young millionaire’s lap, fingering himself, while the young millionaire watches him, and the room is cold, Kihyun didn’t turn the heat up high enough before he left, but there’s no air between them whatsoever, Kihyun can’t breathe. Electricity crackles over his skin whenever Changkyun adjusts his hold on his hip, soothing him as Kihyun bites his lip in concentration. 

Is this too intimate for near-strangers? It’s only their third date. Is it too intense? Changkyun sits up and tucks Kihyun in closer, and Kihyun leans in for a kiss just on instinct by now, Changkyun’s lips fever-hot against his own. The blade of Changkyun’s tongue presses to the roof of Kihyun’s mouth and Kihyun curves his fingers, moans into him, tilts his head down to kiss Changkyun’s neck instead. He’s appealing here, too, Kihyun may have been momentarily floored by his oral skills but he still knows that Changkyun is anything but virile, but here— here he smells alive, his pulse jumps under the rub of Kihyun’s nose, and Kihyun plays nice, plays so nice, kisses him soft and fluttering, careful. No teeth. 

“I like your apartment,” Changkyun says, and Kihyun laughs quietly, appreciates the moment of respite, a chance to breathe, and comes up to kiss him far more gently. Can’t even bring himself to be annoyed or bitter by Changkyun, who probably lives in the spire of the Empire State Building, finding his shoebox cute. Changkyun’s hand is moving down between them, borrowing some lube from Kihyun’s fingers, and he’s rubbing a fingertip against the edge of Kihyun’s rim, back and forth, just to stretch him more, just to give him some friction that sparks up Kihyun’s spine and makes him moan softly.

“God,” Kihyun sighs, working his hips down against both of their hands. “God— what if—”

“What?” Changkyun encourages, eager, and Kihyun presses their foreheads together, starting to smile.

“What if you finished what you started?” It’ll be easier to take a dick if he’s come already, after all, and he can tell Changkyun isn’t small based on the print straining up against his thigh, he’ll need more prep. Changkyun’s eyes flash and he helps Kihyun out of his lap, back out against the bed, he must _really _love this, carefully guides Kihyun’s hand away, pulls his fingers out and replaces them with two of his own after— Kihyun shudders— spitting on his knuckles to ease the way.

So he likes to use his mouth. Kihyun’s gasp is more like a cry for help when Changkyun suckles just on the head of his cock, his two fingers, thicker and less precise than Kihyun’s, stretching him open. He’s just licking him, laving over him, while his fingers push in and out with the surprised gratification of a man who wasn’t expecting to top tonight but is plenty enthusiastic about it now that he sees how it is. A well-timed curve of his knuckles has him pressing right against Kihyun’s prostate and Kihyun doesn’t know what to _do _when he feels this good, feels so out of control, it’s almost terrifying, but then Changkyun does it again and Kihyun’s brain just goes blank and blissful, Changkyun’s sucking on him with so much purpose but also like he could do this all day, spend weeks between Kihyun’s legs, his thumb pressed just above Kihyun’s hole, and that extra added stimulation makes Kihyun’s whole body seize up and he starts honest-to-God whimpering. 

With anyone else, he’d be so fucking embarrassed and angry with himself, but he knows Changkyun won’t make fun of him, won’t use this against him, he knows Changkyun is loving it. Changkyun’s eyes are closed and he’s so _devoted_, the rise and fall of his smart, dark head as he takes Kihyun’s cock down his mouth so hypnotic, his cheeks hollowed, when he comes up for air — which isn’t very often — he can’t keep his tongue off Kihyun anyway and keeps licking over him, smaller sucking kisses, and his free hand, the one that’s not pushing right against Kihyun’s most sensitive spots with aching, infuriating purpose, is shaking just a little on Kihyun’s hip. 

This man is _not _a virgin. Kihyun feels very misled. This man is wringing Kihyun to pieces with his mouth and his hands, and Kihyun can’t even do anything about it, he can’t shut up, he feels it building, and he reaches down, his hips twitching off the bed and his ears beginning to buzz. “Changkyun,” he says, struggling for air. “Changkyun. I’m gonna come, you’re gonna make me come—”

Changkyun’s eyes open to meet Kihyun’s gaze and he sinks down on Kihyun’s cock to the base, stuffing the head of Kihyun right up to the back of his throat — like it takes no effort, like it’s all he’s ever wanted. Then he tightens his lips and draws _up_, physically sucks it out of him, crooks his fingers just _so_, and Kihyun arches up hard, can’t breathe, can’t think, all he can do is _come_, so intense and so powerful that he’s trembling all through it, his whole body twitching and shuddering apart.

Changkyun pulls off slowly, licks the head of his dick to make sure he’s gotten it all, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Kihyun is almost afraid of him, of the way Changkyun is looking at him, but all he does now is weakly spread his legs wider, spent. He still wants Changkyun to fuck him, though — if anything, he wants it even more, and he fumbles to find the condoms he’d taken out earlier, holding one out to Changkyun, who bends down to kiss the center of his palm before taking it.

Strangers don’t fuck like this. They must not be strangers, then. Changkyun pulls off his jeans and boxer briefs, lets his cock bob free, and Kihyun is still shivering, he’s starting to get cold and wants Changkyun back on top of him. Changkyun’s not gone long, though, tears open the condom and rolls it onto himself and waits for Kihyun to tell him where to go.

Kihyun stares at him, considers things. Changkyun is uncut and thick, Kihyun is going to feel that tomorrow, will have to limp, not walk, to the bagel place down the street to get them both breakfast, but fuck, he wants it, his mouth is watering. He closes his legs and rolls over onto his front, pushing his slender hips up for Changkyun to take hold of, because— if Changkyun kissed him, kissed him while he pushed inside, it’d be too much, and it’s already too much. Changkyun doesn’t protest, doesn’t question, just moves as directed, pressing the warm, firm length of his body down along Kihyun’s back while his thick cock presses between Kihyun’s thighs.

“Do it,” Kihyun breathes, eyes closed, a shiver running down his spine in anticipation. 

Changkyun doesn’t, though, and Kihyun isn’t going to beg, he doesn’t even know how, and next time he’s going to make _Changkyun _beg, fuck yes, but now he just needs Changkyun in him, what’s taking so long? “Kiss me first,” Changkyun says and Kihyun makes an indistinct noise, impatient, turns his head to the side and lets Changkyun press his lips to the side of Kihyun’s mouth.

But that’s easy to get caught up in. Changkyun is very distracting. Kihyun rolls over under him as much as he can, just barely enough so their mouths can meet more fully, and he’s fascinated by the way Changkyun tastes, he knows that that’s his own come, but somehow what’s dirtier even than that is how Changkyun moans into his lips, that low, rich voice lower and richer than ever. 

Kihyun won’t beg. He won’t say please. All he does is kiss Changkyun more urgently, he pulls at his lower lip with his teeth barely long enough to give Changkyun a ghost of a sting, and Changkyun, satisfied, lets him go, breaks away. He puts one hand on the bed and the other on the back of Kihyun’s hip, curls around the sharp jut of his pelvis, and starts to push into him.

They both moan, but it’s not too much, after Changkyun’s fingers it’s perfect, and Kihyun nods frantically to let Changkyun know it’s okay, he’s okay. Changkyun keeps going, now he’s just braced on an elbow and his breath is panting hot against the curve of Kihyun’s neck, the back of his ear. It’s a good half-minute before he bottoms out — how _polite _— and Kihyun doesn’t even know what to _do_ with himself, Changkyun fills him up so well, blunt and tight and so fucking good. 

It’s so good, and then Changkyun starts actually fucking him, and Kihyun loses his mind a little bit. Changkyun’s low voice is moaning into the back of his neck and his hand is finding Kihyun’s in the sheets, their fingers interlacing so tightly, pressed down deep into the mattress by Kihyun’s head as Changkyun thrusts into him. He’s doing it exactly how Kihyun likes it, just verging on too firm but not brutal, Changkyun’s not capable of brutality, he just wants to feel good, all he wants is for both of them to feel good. Kihyun’s moaning against his freshly-changed bedsheets, open-mouthed and gasping and panting until the cotton is wet, while Changkyun’s lips move on his skin. He even kisses his earlobe, tugs at it with his lips, and Kihyun doesn’t _wail_ but it’s a near thing. 

Where did Changkyun learn to fuck? Boarding school? _Columbia? _Kihyun’s moans are slurring together and Changkyun’s not much better off, his voice is getting higher and higher, which should not be as stupidly cute as it is. He angles his hips and somehow manages to hit Kihyun’s prostate on his down-stroke and Kihyun’s grip is crushing on Changkyun’s hand, and then Changkyun strokes the side of Kihyun’s thumb with his own and Kihyun feels like he’s really going to die, he’s really about to die, and all of this has been for nothing.

Then Changkyun kisses his neck and rumbles, “You’re _amazing_,” and Kihyun can’t do this, he can’t do this, he squeezes Changkyun’s hand so tightly and says, “Can we— can we move? I need to— I want to see you.”

And he does, he wants to see what Changkyun’s eyes are like when he’s fucking him, wants to see the moment Changkyun loses it completely. Changkyun, obedient as ever, pulls out of him and lets Kihyun move them around, and Kihyun normally doesn’t have the patience or the motivation to ride, but he sure is feeling motivated tonight. He feels like he could do anything, really, now that Changkyun isn’t pinning him down and rumbling through his chest, making Kihyun feel so fragile. So he pushes Changkyun onto his back and straddles him, like he’d been when he was fingering himself, and Changkyun goes up onto his elbows so he can see him better.

“I think _you’re_ amazing,” Kihyun says as he sits back down on Changkyun’s dick, and he _means _it, he fucking means it, Changkyun has stayed so hard this whole time and he feels amazing, the perfect size, and Kihyun braces his hands against Changkyun’s chest and then leans down to kiss him as he starts to fuck himself on Changkyun. Changkyun makes a low sound, too worked up to be able to kiss him back anymore, and sits up so Kihyun will be fully in his lap, so they can grind together. 

It’s so hot, finally Kihyun is overheating, flushed and sticky where their bodies meet, Kihyun’s arms draped over Changkyun’s shoulders, their chests aligned, their hips working hard. Kihyun isn’t bouncing on his dick or anything, but with how intense it feels he may as well be, as it is he’s barely moving, just rocking back and forth, and each time Changkyun fills him up, a soft gasp is punched out of him and Changkyun groans to match. Kihyun tilts his head up by the hair and they kiss, all tongue, Kihyun’s never felt more powerful and powerless all at once — if Changkyun stops moving, stops thrusting that thick cock up into him, he’ll be devastated, but Kihyun’s in control, too, riding Changkyun how he likes it. 

Kihyun has already come once so he’s oversensitive, pleasure is everywhere, all through him, all around him, and Changkyun buries his mouth in Kihyun’s shoulder, his fingers digging into Kihyun’s hips, into his ass. Kihyun’s grinding down hard, twisting his hips, tightening around him, and Changkyun goes all tense and then all shuddery, his hoarse, low moans almost like hiccups, almost like sobs. He’s holding onto Kihyun so tightly and Kihyun doesn’t slow down, grinds it out for him, while Changkyun quivers in his arms. 

“Kihyun,” Changkyun breathes, still hidden in his shoulders, and he sounds like he’s so deep in love, moves his hands like he is, too, and his fingertips are still trembling. He wraps them around Kihyun’s dick and Kihyun’s thighs shake from exertion, from arousal, from everything, and Changkyun tips Kihyun out onto his back and presses on top of him, kisses his numbed, slack mouth, and strokes his cock until Kihyun comes _again_, hasn’t had the time for multiple orgasms since early college, and it’s too much and Kihyun is twitchy and overheated and moaning too much, way too much, and Changkyun is looking at him with all this _hunger_, they just went a round and a half but it clearly wasn’t enough for him.

Kihyun tries to say something but the words don’t come. Changkyun pulls out and Kihyun exhales shakily, his legs still splayed out and defenseless, and Changkyun leans down to kiss into the curve of his hip, pet his hand up and down Kihyun’s thigh, touching him like he’s precious, like he’s made of glass and Changkyun is checking for cracks, like he never wants his hands to be off of him ever again, if he can help it. Kihyun makes a soft, murmuring sound and tilts his head to beckon Changkyun up to him, and Changkyun comes to him, they take each other into their arms, and they kiss for a long, long time, horizontal with their bodies pressed together chests to ankles, Changkyun breathing soft and even, Kihyun sighing every once in a while.

Finally, Changkyun can barely kiss him back. Kihyun very, very gently moves him up the bed, then tucks him in, all while Changkyun looks at him with starry, impossible eyes, like Kihyun’s just given him the world. Funny that Kihyun’s planning to take it from him, and Kihyun smiles, kissing Changkyun’s cheek, the point of his chin, the arch of his too-big nose. Changkyun is visibly tickled but doesn’t shy away, just lets Kihyun kiss him softly. 

“I’ll be right back,” Kihyun whispers into Changkyun’s mouth, then stands on unsteady legs that only have about four minutes left before they give out completely, walks the tiny distance to his equally tiny bathroom, washes himself clean with a towel he’d laid out for this express purpose several hours ago. He can’t bear to look at himself in the mirror. _What the hell just happened?_

When he gets back to bed, Changkyun is asleep. His cheek is pressed into the pillow pretty hard; in the morning, there’ll be a crease. He looks as young and idiotic and trusting as he always does — Kihyun could be _anyone_, and Changkyun’s just falling asleep in his bed without a second thought — and Kihyun draws the blinds closed so the sunlight doesn’t disturb him in a few hours, then gets into bed and reaches out to pull the sheet up over him, then the comforter. Changkyun is snuffling very quietly against Kihyun’s pillow, and Kihyun leaves his hand on his shoulder for a moment before moving it away.

God, he’s winded. He can’t feel his legs anymore. His neighbors probably hate him. Kihyun hates himself, too, honestly. He’d thought he’d have to fake that from start to finish, but he hadn’t faked a second. Kihyun slides down in his bed and stares at the ceiling, still trying to catch his breath.

And he thinks, _It doesn’t matter. This doesn’t complicate things at all. It doesn’t matter. It’s fine._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for reading chapter 1!!!!!!! since i’m still writing, updates will be slow, **about once a month. **so see you all again in another month! please subscribe to the story (or to me) if you want to know what happens next!!!!! again, [the official playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/12MLmAfM9PhFB63N7EWMww?si=_3gUbex3RsCyKU_AH9Hczg), but there are also (individual, much more extensive) playlists for changkyun and kihyun, if youd like those links pls just let me know!!
> 
> my twitter is [here](https://twitter.com/paratazxis) (with a link to my k0-fi for interested parties) and my curiouscat is [here](https://curiouscat.me/paratazxis); please come chat with me about your thoughts or theories or questions or concerns -- feel free to tag it with #FoolproofAO3!! and pleeeease do comment here bc i’d lov to know what people think :’’)) i started work on this fic in april of this year and it’s truly a labor of love, and i’m so excited to share it with people!!! thank you, and see you next month!!!!


	2. Months 2-4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Changkyun has a secret; milestones; travel; an invitation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello everyone!!! still with me????? here’s chapter two!!! but first i just wanted to say im so blown away by the response to this, im so glad you’re invested and entertained, i hope you like the rest :’’)))
> 
> warnings for this chapter: BRIEF MENTIONS but NO DEPICTIONS of all of the following - murder methods, rough sex, minor original character death, homophobia
> 
> more info at the end, but for now, without further ado --

_MONTH 2_

Kihyun texts his rarely-used group message with Minhyuk, Wonho, and Hyungwon: _I met someone_.

They reply in that order: Minhyuk, then Wonho, then Hyungwon. Minhyuk accuses Kihyun of pranking them again, Wonho asks for more information but is generally positive, and Hyungwon sends a thumbs-up emoji.

_It’s not a prank this time. He’s really sweet_, Kihyun says and attaches what is so far the only picture of them together, slightly blurry because Kihyun moved at the last second when he pressed the button. They’re both smiling and a little shy, standing in the warm, golden light of the setting sun, because Kihyun had said “You look so nice right now” and Changkyun had said “_You _look so nice right now” and they’d decided to take a picture to commemorate such a wondrous occasion. Then they went bowling. Kihyun hates what his life has become. But Changkyun looks happy in the picture, embarrassingly so, his eyes too soft and crinkled for how small he’s smiling, and Kihyun doesn’t look bad, either, his head tilted just enough so that their hair can touch.

He scrolls through their rapid, impressed responses with detached displeasure. Yes, Minhyuk is right, “sweet” has never been Kihyun’s type, but Minhyuk will _love _Changkyun, especially considering how much he’s hated everyone else Kihyun has ever seriously dated. Changkyun is temperamental, sensitive, impressionable, there’s no coldness in him. Minhyuk hates it when Kihyun’s boyfriends have no sense of humor, but Changkyun laughs at everything, easily, unstudied, like a child who hasn’t learned to control his emotions in socially polite settings yet. They’ve been on five and a half dates, now, the “half” being what Kihyun privately refers to the morning-after of their third date as, and Changkyun hasn’t gotten used to him yet, every time he sees him it’s like he’s never seen anyone more amazing before, ever. 

That morning-after, though. Technically it began the night of. Kihyun had awoken disoriented and overheated because Changkyun was moving around and Kihyun was, for some reason, right up against him, and he’d lain a gentle hand on Changkyun’s arm and murmured, “You okay?” and Changkyun had rumbled back, “Forgot to take my contacts out,” and the shock of there being something Kihyun had _missed_, he hadn’t noticed that Changkyun had contacts, his eyesight had somehow never come up in all of Kihyun’s research, had made it impossible for Kihyun to fall back asleep for a good half-hour after Changkyun had gone off to remove his contacts and then come back to bed, himself passing out again immediately. In the morning, Kihyun did limp off to get them breakfast, and they ate in bed, kissing every once in a while, just enjoying each other’s company. The morning became the day, and Changkyun didn’t leave, blinking at Kihyun with somewhat unfocused eyes until the intercom buzzed and Changkyun said, “Oh, that’ll be my glasses,” and then Kihyun had to go retrieve Changkyun’s glasses from a literal errand boy waiting outside. So now the three people who know that Changkyun and Kihyun fucked last night are Kihyun, Changkyun, and some little prick on a spring semester internship. Kihyun brought the case back upstairs and gave it to Changkyun, and then Changkyun lounged around in his bed for the next couple hours, wearing wire-frame glasses that made him look comically pathetic and no pants. “I… should go,” he said hesitantly somewhere around three o’clock, but it sounded like a question, and Kihyun _hates _having people just _existing _in his space so he’d had to pull a pout and very reluctantly say, “Well, if you have to,” knowing damn well that Changkyun wouldn’t have the guts to say that no, he doesn’t have to, and he’d love to stay if that’s alright. Changkyun didn’t say that. He got dressed, kissed Kihyun about twenty times, and went home. Kihyun watched him out of the window, then went over to retrieve his Moleskine, which Changkyun had slept eight feet away from and been none the wiser, to check the box he’d made beside the rest of his notes for the third date, their first month together. 

Since then, they went bowling, and they went to the Frick. That was an interesting date. The art itself was fine, walking around at a gallery pace holding hands with Changkyun and feigning interest in pastoral landscapes from the 1800s was fine, the interesting part wasn’t even the museum _itself_, it was this thing Changkyun keeps doing, where he just—

“Oh, I’ve always wanted to go,” Kihyun had said, “but the lines are always too long, I never made it in before I had to be somewhere else.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Changkyun had replied with a very small shrug, and then they really _didn’t_ need to worry about it — they’d just shown up, gone to the front, had a very brief conversation with someone, and been allowed right in. They hadn’t even had to pay for admission.

As nice as that was, it had rankled Kihyun for a good twenty minutes. Changkyun has so much money to spare; he doesn’t deserve _anything _for free. After they were done at the Frick, though, they went out for dinner, and Kihyun had done everything right, held his hand over the table, tilted his head attractively to the side to listen to his stories, done a dramatic reading under his breath of the descriptions the restaurant’s private sommelier had given to all the most expensive wines on the list just to make Changkyun laugh, and then— nothing.

Nothing. They haven’t had sex since that first time. What is Changkyun _waiting _for? Oh, sure, they kiss, Changkyun reaches for his hand before Kihyun can even remember that holding hands is something they need to do, he looks at him with his longing, puppy-lovesick eyes, but they haven’t fucked again. Kihyun— isn’t _proud _of how he performed when they were in bed together, but he can acknowledge that it was good, in its own way, and he finds himself remembering it at the oddest times, just staring into his work computer without seeing the market analysis reports he’s meant to be working on, zoning out in the process of ordering lunch at his local sandwichery. Sometimes — but not all the time — when he’s falling asleep. On more than one occasion he’s reached for his phone as though to text Changkyun to come over for something uncomplicated, something fast and messy and dirty, Changkyun on his knees with Kihyun holding the back of his skull or Changkyun bent over the kitchen countertop with his hands white-knuckled on the laminate or Changkyun face-down in Kihyun’s bed, muffling those helpless, hoarse whines in Kihyun’s sheets. But he’s put his phone back down every time, remembering that what they have is anything but uncomplicated. Changkyun thinks Kihyun is falling in love with him, but Kihyun is checking the stock price of KB Pharmaceuticals daily, and if it drops too much at any given point, he doesn’t text Changkyun back.

What Kihyun is starting to realize, which he should have realized a long time ago, when he’d first cooked this plan up, is that relationships take _effort_. It’s not like an elementary school friendship, where a simple declaration of best friend status was all it took. They have to see each other regularly. He can’t even look forward to the weekend anymore, because so far, he’s had to see Changkyun on the weekends. They most recently saw each other on Wednesday, and Changkyun texts him that he misses him. He still doesn’t text very much, which is nice. But he’s still texting more. Yesterday he had the absolute gall to send Kihyun an _article_, and Kihyun had to _read it _and then reply to Changkyun with his _thoughts_ on the subject. Exhausting. But they don’t have any plans for this weekend, and Kihyun is glad for the break. He knows this will take effort, it’ll take maintenance, watering, and pruning like a prize-winning bonsai, but even a prize-winning bonsai needs the occasional breather.

Honestly, Kihyun doesn’t know much about bonsai trees. They’re out of his tax bracket. He’s sure Changkyun knows, though. Probably had one instead of a succulent in his dorm room freshman year. God, Kihyun can’t wait to make him pay.

But this is a dangerous line to toe. If Kihyun waits too long, leaves him on read for too long, he knows that Changkyun, troubled as he is, will start to worry that Kihyun is losing interest in him, and we can’t have _that_. He texts back that he misses Changkyun, too, that he thought of him today, and that he’d like to see him on Sunday, if he’s free. The weather is supposed to be perfect, and maybe they can go for a walk through the botanical gardens of Central Park. Changkyun replies yes immediately. The typing bubble appears, then disappears, then appears again, and he finally sends just the kiss emoji. 

Kihyun sighs and puts his phone down. When is a normal time to say I love you, in a relationship? He’s gotten that far with exes, but again, the situations are hardly comparable. He does what he’s been doing this whole time — he googles it — and reads some articles about the pressure of modern dating. It seems like the standard answers are not before five dates, not before three months, not during sex, not during a fight, and finally, Kihyun’s favorite: “Never say it first, and don't echo it back until you've spent some extended time together.” 

All these answers about when not to do it. But when _should _he do it? Changkyun will probably say it first, then Kihyun will say it back. Kihyun chews his lower lip and clicks on an article on Cosmopolitan, then goes down a rabbit hole of learning about sex positions, and then he’s no better off than when he started.

(When he gets home, he pencils it into his schedule under _month 3._)

Since they now have plans for Sunday, Saturday is free. Kihyun goes grocery shopping, watches half of a documentary about the printing press, meal preps breakfast for the next three days. It’s a warmer day today, so he even opens the window, then regrets it when someone on the street starts smoking a particularly noxious clove cigarette. Closes his window again, resumes his documentary, and scrubs his stove while he watches. It’s a peaceful day, verging on a good day, so of _course _everything has to be spectacularly ruined by the sound of his phone spitting forth the text tone he set for Changkyun. 

_Are you home right now?_

Never a good message to get with no context. Kihyun considers lying, but just in case Changkyun has decided to surprise him with the key to the city and a wardrobe’s worth of Alexander Wang, he texts back that yes, he is. Almost instantaneously, the intercom buzzes and Kihyun swears colorfully, stripping off his kitchen-cleaning gloves and storming over to buzz him in, cursing the day Changkyun was born, cursing the day Kihyun chose him for his purposes, wishing everybody on this whole godforsaken planet were dead.

But by the time Changkyun has made it up the stairs, Kihyun is the picture of calm, perfect, domestic bliss. “Fancy meeting you here!” he beams as he opens the door, leaning against the frame. Changkyun doesn’t have suitcases full of designer outerwear, just an equally big smile on his face and a small satchel.

“Hi,” he says, and they kiss, both smiling into it. “I missed you too much to wait until tomorrow. Are you busy?”

Yes. “Not at all!” 

“Do you… I was going to ask if it was okay for me to come over, but then I kinda wanted to surprise you,” Changkyun explains, shy. “How do you feel about surprises?”

They’re easily one of Kihyun’s top five least favorite concepts. If he can’t predict a situation, he can’t control it. Luckily, his apartment is tidy, the Moleskine is hidden, he wasn’t _really _doing anything, but still— what an imposition. What an assumption. He’s fuming. “Love them,” he says, his voice soft. “I’m so happy you’re here. Come in!”

“I have movies,” Changkyun says, rattling the satchel ominously, and enters the apartment. They exchange some more small kisses in the tiny entryway, and Changkyun politely takes off his shoes and goes through. “What were you up to?”

“Just cleaning,” Kihyun says. “Are you hungry? I was about to make lunch.”

“Starving,” Changkyun says eagerly. 

Great. Now he’s going to mooch off Kihyun’s hard-earned groceries. “Okay,” Kihyun smiles, skimming a light, affectionate hand down Changkyun’s arm. “Can I get you anything to drink? Make yourself at home, babe.”

Changkyun makes a very small noise, going red around the edges, and goes over to sit in Kihyun’s desk chair. Today he’s in a sweatshirt and loose-fitting jeans, and his hair is smoother, glossier. He looks all of eight years old, especially when he’s mooning over Kihyun calling him _babe_ and offering to cook for him. “What do you have?”

“Coffee, tea, sparkling water, still water, V8, maybe a beer,” Kihyun replies. “And I was thinking stuffed peppers for lunch. Does that sound okay?”

“Perfect,” Changkyun says. “Um, just— sparkling water, I guess. Thank you.”

Kihyun rewards him with a smile and gets the bottle of San Pellegrino out of the fridge. Changkyun better not get used to coming here too often. When they move in together because “you’re over here all the time anyway,” the “here” in question is going to be whatever three-story brownstone Changkyun lives in, not Kihyun’s shoeless shoebox. He pours a glass for Changkyun — sparkling water, who _likes _sparkling water, Kihyun only got it on the off-chance Changkyun would be the kind of freak to enjoy it and he’s almost half-disappointed that he was right — and comes over to give it to him, smiling at Changkyun when Changkyun smiles at him.

“What movies did you bring?” Kihyun asks, figuring he may as well take a break from cleaning, and sits on the bed, which is only about a couple feet away from the desk, they’re still very close. 

“Oh, right!” Changkyun remembers, grabbing his satchel. It’s not even a _name-brand _satchel. He probably got it at a tourist trap off Times Square. Where does his money go? If he’s not even using it, why hasn’t he given it all to Kihyun already? Ugh. “_Some Like It Hot_. Since we— you know, we were going to watch it, but we haven’t yet. And a Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire, just because it looked fun. And… Tarkovsky’s _Mirror_, but…”

“I love that film,” Kihyun sighs. “It’s too heavy for such a nice day, though.”

“Definitely!” Changkyun agrees, sitting up straighter, all excited about being agreed with. Nothing in the history of the world, not even the triangle, has ever been easier to play than Changkyun is. All Kihyun has to do is call an art movie a _film_ and he’s about to come in his jeans. Kihyun smiles at him and they lean forward to each other to kiss again.

“Let’s watch _Some Like It Hot_,” Kihyun suggests after they’re done kissing. “I’ll cook first, though, right?”

“I’ll help!” Changkyun offers immediately, and then they’re in the kitchen for a while, chatting and flirting over the sink, over the stove. Changkyun isn’t bad as a sous-chef. He takes instructions well, but Kihyun is being _extremely _lenient, letting Changkyun sample all the ingredients, not criticizing him for cutting unevenly. He probably has a live-in personal culinary team, no wonder he doesn’t know how to chop a carrot. 

Midway through the cooking process, Changkyun expresses a vague interest in having coffee, and Kihyun has to confess that while yes, he does have coffee that can be made, he doesn’t know how to operate the French press he got as a housewarming gift, even though it’s been two years since he’s gotten it, and Changkyun actually _teaches him how_. Full Patrick Swayze in _Ghost_, he stands behind Kihyun with his arms around him and helps him push the plunger down, and they’re both giggling messes by the end, laughing too much to be able to take it seriously or finish brewing the coffee. They end up abandoning it, pouring the grounds down Kihyun’s garbage disposal, and having green tea instead, by which time the oven is done pre-heating and Kihyun puts the peppers in.

They move to Kihyun’s bed. He’d planned ahead for the sake of his sheets this time, and put a quilt down over everything. “I wish I had a couch,” Kihyun says somewhat regretfully, “and I had one when I first moved in, but then there was just no free space at all, so I had to get rid of it.”

“This is nice, though,” Changkyun murmurs, warm and close, his ankle on top of Kihyun’s, and Kihyun bites his lip slightly, acting amused by his incorrigible flirtatiousness, and leans in to give him a kiss before reaching to get his laptop. “Wait— wait. Before we start, I have something to tell you. A couple of things.”

“Hm?” Kihyun says, expecting it to just be, like, Changkyun has this movie memorized, but when he looks over to him, Changkyun isn’t smiling anymore, and he’s worried and tense and pale. “Oh. Okay. What is it?”

“I haven’t been totally… honest with you about myself,” Changkyun says after a moment. “There’s just some things that I— I didn’t want them to just come up in conversation, I was waiting to tell you, until we got a little more serious, and I’d feel weird not telling you, going forward. So.”

“Okay,” Kihyun says again, more softly, a little more concerned. “I’m listening.”

Changkyun makes a face. Scrunches up his nose, looks off to the side, breathes in a couple of times. “So, there’s two things. The first thing is— I know you, you can probably tell that I’m… _well-off,_ and I know I told you that I work in Big Pharma, but, like. It’s my company. I’m not just on the executive board, I _am _the executive board, they just couldn’t come up with a more specific title for me. It was my parents’ company, and now it’s mine, and I get a really big cut of the profits and everything, um. I know that might not be a huge deal, but I didn’t want to keep not acknowledging it, you know? I just wanted to get that out there.”

He must have written in to an advice column. Dear Abby, how do I tell my boyfriend of five dates that I’m crazy stupid filthy rich? Sometimes I dress like I’m homeless and I go on a lot of rants about popular culture, so he might _think_ I’m a destitute hipster, but I’m actually the one-percent of the one-percent. Signed, Lost in the Sauce. “I kind of figured,” Kihyun says, smiling, but so gently, so, so gently, laying his hand over Changkyun’s wrist. “Our first date cost, what, upwards of a thousand dollars? I might not be a rocket scientist, but I did the math.”

“Okay,” Changkyun says, so relieved, and folds his hand over Kihyun’s. “I thought you might already know, but I just wanted to make sure. I swear I’m a regular person, well— okay, I’m pretty weird—” Hold for laughs, and Kihyun does as Changkyun expects him to, light and fond— “it’s not that important to me, how much money I have. I just try to live my life to the fullest, in good faith. Does that make sense?”

Kihyun hums in assent, then leans in to kiss him on the cheek. “Is that it? You were nervous to tell me that? You’re so sweet,” he murmurs, not a hint of condescension, just soothing, but Changkyun shakes his head.

“There’s one other thing,” he says, and _this _is the big one, he goes all tense and jumpy again. “You might have noticed that I don’t really— I haven’t mentioned my parents much. That’s because they’re dead.”

“Oh,” Kihyun says.

“Sorry for just springing that on you, there’s just— there’s no real easy way to say that, and I know you’re too polite to ask, but my parents passed away in 2013, both at the same time, in an accident,” Changkyun says, talking very fast and anxious. “I was in college, I had to take a semester off to deal with it, but I’m okay now, it was a long time ago, you don’t have to say you’re sorry. It’s okay. I just wanted you to know.”

There is a natural silence and Changkyun lifts his eyes to look at Kihyun, and Kihyun sighs very softly, giving Changkyun’s hand a tighter squeeze. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he says quietly. “I did assume they weren’t in the picture, but you’re right, I wasn’t going to ask. Thank you for telling me.”

Changkyun nods, tense, but he looks better, calmer. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s just one of those things. No real good way to say it. I figured out pretty fast that it was better to acknowledge it just like this instead of letting everyone dance around the subject.”

“I appreciate that,” Kihyun agrees, their hands fully linked by now, and Changkyun’s palms, blessedly, are a little less sweaty than usual. “My strategy when it comes to talking about my parents is just to… not talk about them at all, but we’re just estranged.”

“Oh,” Changkyun says. His eyes get very sad. 

“It’s okay,” Kihyun assures him quickly. “I know what you’re thinking. That’s unfair, right? That my parents are still alive, but I’m not taking advantage of that? We’ve been estranged for a while. They tried to kick me out twice for being gay, and finally I just left by myself, before they could make it permanent. I may as well be dead to them, even if they’re not dead to me.”

“Oh, _God_,” Changkyun says, holding Kihyun’s hands very tightly.

Kihyun last spoke to his father on the phone two months ago, just to confirm that his mother’s back surgery had gone well. Their estrangement is informal, has nothing to do with Kihyun being gay, when he came out to them, defensive and proud at the age of 15, they barely even batted an eye, but the whole family has always viewed their responsibilities as parents and child as a business relationship. Once Kihyun came of age and no longer required financial support, they called it a day. Kihyun’s whole family is a long line of people who might be called “unfeeling” by the general public. They themselves prefer the term “efficient.” No love lost. They don’t even send each other Christmas cards. 

“It really is okay,” Kihyun says softly, giving Changkyun a small, bittersweet smile. “It’s better like this, trust me.”

This little detail was one Kihyun came up with early on. It means Changkyun won’t fall all over himself trying to get into Mr. and Mrs. Yoo’s good graces, it’s two fewer people to witness the wedding, it’s one less thing to worry about, all in all. Changkyun won’t ask him about them again. He clearly respects him too much.

“I’m sorry for your loss, too,” Changkyun says, and of course Kihyun has to act like that affects him very deeply, does a sort of brave nod, smiles hollowly, and they just gaze commiseratively at each other for a moment before kissing again, smaller and sweeter. 

The oven makes a beeping noise to indicate a problem, and Kihyun pulls away and gets up to go check — turns out it was just switching from convection to regular mode. Changkyun sets up the movie in the meantime, and they’re being shy with each other again, all that honesty and vulnerability making them more hesitant to make lingering eye contact. But by the time they’re getting comfy on Kihyun’s bed, the laptop rested precariously on a cushion at the foot of the bed, that’s easing off, and Kihyun cuddles up by Changkyun’s side and Changkyun rests his head on Kihyun’s shoulder.

“I hope you like it,” Changkyun says as the opening credits start, and Kihyun smiles, reminding himself sternly not to laugh at any of the jokes before they happen.

“I’m sure I’ll love it,” he says, then shushes them both, which makes them both laugh as the credits continue. 

Kihyun really has seen this movie about five times, but Changkyun keeps looking over to him to see if he’s enjoying it, if Changkyun did well by surprising him with this little date. They’ve finished eating by now, and Kihyun has Changkyun pause the movie so he can get up and take the dishes to the kitchen. “I kind of want popcorn,” Changkyun says thoughtfully. “It feels weird to watch a movie this good without popcorn.”

Kihyun smiles, fond. “Well, I don’t have any, but I can go get some.” He doesn’t want Changkyun alone in the apartment, though, snooping around. “Wanna come with?”

And so they go down to the bodega a block away together, holding hands on the street. Kihyun can tell that Changkyun is enjoying being in Kihyun’s neighborhood, which cannot be allowed to happen, and he starts thinking of ways to get himself invited over to Changkyun’s place, which he hasn’t seen yet. Maybe Changkyun was just waiting to show him until he’d told him about how rich he is? All of this is disgustingly domestic, and so fucking _boring_, picking out movie theater butter versus old-fashioned butter, and when they’re back at Kihyun’s apartment,they take the peppers out of the oven and kiss the whole time the microwave is going, leaned up against the kitchen counter with Changkyun’s tongue hesitantly licking at Kihyun’s lower lip until the popcorn very nearly burns. 

They transfer the singed popcorn to a bowl, get back on the bed, and resume the movie. “I think this scene might have been my bisexual awakening,” Changkyun observes, watching Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis in drag shimmying around on a train. 

Kihyun snorts, delicately wiping his popcorn-butter-greased fingers on a paper towel. “Really? He doesn’t pass very well.”

“Yeah, but _Marilyn_,” Changkyun says. Oh, he’s going to love Wonho, when Kihyun introduces everyone.

“Fair enough,” Kihyun says. On-screen, Marilyn is sighing about how she wants a millionaire, someone with a yacht and his own toothpaste. Kihyun somehow doubts that Changkyun maintains a steady toothpaste stash, he doesn’t seem reliable enough. But Marilyn also wants her millionaire to wear glasses, because _men who wear glasses are so much more gentle and sweet and helpless, _and Kihyun can’t look away from Changkyun, Changkyun and his weak eyes from reading all those long columns of tiny figures in the Wall Street Journal, Changkyun who really is gentle and sweet and helpless and does wear glasses sometimes, and Changkyun blinks and notices Kihyun staring at him and goes pink.

“Watch the movie,” he insists, shy, and Kihyun realizes all of a sudden that the _only _reason Changkyun hasn’t tried to jump his bones since the last time is that he felt dishonest for not telling him about his wealth, didn’t want to sleep with Kihyun under semi-false pretenses, and so he leans in to kiss him, unambiguous. He’s tired of wasting time. If they’re going to be stuck in the boring early-days domestic phase for a while, they may as well be fucking like rabbits to make it more tolerable. Isn’t that what people do, in the early days of a relationship? Frankly, Kihyun is insulted that Changkyun can keep his hands off him, but based on the immediate, intense way Changkyun kisses him back, it’s clear he’s been feeling the absence, too. 

It’s good so far. Fine, even. But Kihyun doesn’t feel like he’s drowning in three inches of water anymore; that must have just been beginner’s luck on Changkyun’s part. Kihyun feels clear and calm and in control, pressing closer to Changkyun and kissing him deeper, and when Changkyun makes a small, shaky noise and says, uncertain, “If— if you didn’t want to watch anything, you could have just said,” Kihyun kisses him again and says, “I did want to, I just _really _missed you.”

Things progress easily from there. Changkyun’s loose sweatshirt gives Kihyun easy access to feeling him up, and they both get overheated very quickly, shedding layers in the warm sunlight streaming in through Kihyun’s dusty window. Changkyun is more pliant this time, not taking the lead as much, but he’s not passive, either, his hands skimming down Kihyun’s back and his cock starting to swell and stiffen in his — Kihyun checks — Hugo Boss boxer briefs. 

“You have such nice hands,” Kihyun mumbles into Changkyun’s mouth, guessing — correctly, based on Changkyun’s immediate blush — that Changkyun likes some praise during sex, likes some praise generally. 

“You have such nice legs,” Changkyun replies when he’s gotten his groove back, and Kihyun raises his eyebrows, already anticipating a full year of Changkyun wheedling weird sex stuff to do with his legs out of him. There are worse preferences for Changkyun to have, and Kihyun’s sure they haven’t even hit the tip of the iceberg, but that’s one, at least. 

“So how about you put your hands on my legs,” Kihyun suggests, smiling coyly, and they both laugh about that, open-mouthed into each other’s lips, as they roll over in the sheets and Changkyun rubs his palms along Kihyun’s thighs. 

They keep kissing. Changkyun likes to kiss, Kihyun noticed that last time and it’s even more obvious now, the way his breathing gets labored when Kihyun suckles on his lower lip or flicks their tongues together, and Kihyun can tell that Changkyun’s oral fixation is starting to crave _more_, but he’d rather keep that mouth away from his dick today, especially since he’s still feeling clear-headed and confident. No need to risk that just for the sake of coming down his enthusiastic throat. 

Everything finishes with mutual handjobs, unhurried but still somehow rushed, like they just can’t wait to feel good together. No real technique, no planning, just Changkyun panting into Kihyun’s neck and Kihyun’s free hand digging into Changkyun’s shoulder, lips pressed against Changkyun’s forehead. Even after they’ve both come they still keep kissing, though Kihyun’s skin is starting to itch everywhere they’re touching, he forces himself to stay there, let Changkyun lick into every corner of his mouth, hold him closer until they’re sharing breaths. It all feels very different to how it had been the other night, very… juvenile, almost, like if it really were Changkyun’s first time, and—

And then Kihyun realizes he’s been doing everything backwards. No wonder it feels juvenile. All of this, really: Changkyun surprising him with movies and requesting popcorn and then them fumbling together until they both get off. It’s what teenagers do. Changkyun never got to be a regular teenager — he was too busy being flown all around the world, going to the symphony with his mother and father, being advised by his family’s lawyers to keep to himself so as to avoid bringing a scandal to the company. So he wants to make up for lost time. He really does want a manic pixie dream girl, someone to remind him of his youth, if his youth had actually been fulfilling. Kihyun’s glad for the direction, as pitiful as that is of a thing for Changkyun to want from a partner. If he wants the teenage dream experience, then by God, will he get it.

Just like that, they spend the whole weekend together. They finish watching _Some Like It Hot_, then go out for dinner at the Neapolitan pizza place Kihyun likes to go to when he’s “feeling fancy” — the peppers, forgotten, end up in Tupperwares in Kihyun’s fridge, all that work for nothing. Changkyun sleeps over, still so helpless and so much younger when he’s asleep, and Kihyun wakes up plastered against his back, sweaty and grouchy. They were going to go to Central Park around mid-morning anyway, so they just go together, stopping at a local coffee shop that’s on the way to get pastries and drinks. It’s a little too cold to be out and about, just a little, colder than expected or predicted, and Kihyun quietly complains about not having brought a scarf. Changkyun folds Kihyun’s hands in his own, kisses his fingertips, pulls him into the tackiest New York City souvenir shop Kihyun has ever seen in his life, and buys him a big red scarf with the Statue of Liberty on it.

“I’m going to keep this forever,” Kihyun says, his cheeks pink from the cold, his eyes bright, fingers petting over the scratchy polyester blend, and Changkyun is looking at him like— like at an oasis in a desert, like an astronaut seeing Earth from space for the first time, like Kihyun is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. Right there, right then, waiting by Central Park and too cold even though it’s 55 degrees out, like Kihyun is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen in his whole entire life.

Changkyun is too dumb-struck even to lean in for a kiss. So Kihyun has to do it, brief and chilly, and then they’re just kissing on the street with Changkyun’s big, gentle hands cradling Kihyun’s jaw. They make it into Central Park eventually and get hot chocolate there from a stand, Changkyun gets his with extra whipped cream because of course he does, and they walk around arm in arm. It’s Sunday, so the park is plenty busy, but as before, they skip the line completely, thanks to a murmured conversation with a manager.

“My parents had a lot of friends,” Changkyun explains somewhat shyly, and Kihyun smiles at him, burrows into his scarf, curls his hands more tightly around Changkyun’s arm and around his cup of hot chocolate. 

Despite the chill, it is a beautiful day, and Kihyun would be hard-pressed to have a bad time no matter how unpleasant his current company is. They walk and talk for about an hour, swapping stories from college, discussing art and music and movies, and Kihyun is careful to say that he likes _theater _but not _musicals_, a pretentious opinion which will probably result in Changkyun gifting him box seats to all the latest off-Broadway dramas but none of the current on-Broadway musicals, thank God. Changkyun was always so much more artistic than his family wanted him to be, he says, but he never felt at home in artists’ communities — even tried going to a few film festivals, but that didn’t stick, either. He’s never felt like he belongs anywhere, really, and real-Kihyun wouldn’t know what to say to that other than “stop complaining about everything” but Changkyun’s Kihyun holds his hand more tightly and says, “I’ve always felt like that, too,” and Changkyun appreciates it all the same. 

Their walk through the park draws to a natural conclusion, but they’re reluctant to leave each other. “I don’t want to go home,” Kihyun says, looking at Changkyun hopefully, and Changkyun smiles so brightly, fixing Kihyun’s scarf where it’s twisted.

“Let’s go somewhere else, then. Are you hungry?” he asks, and they take the subway down to Soho, because Kihyun expressed a mild interest in some hot soup and Changkyun started singing the praises of this udon place he goes to sometimes. 

Soho means they’re close to Changkyun’s apartment. Kihyun is already planning how to work it into conversation, how to ask Changkyun about— a book, or a sculpture, and have Changkyun tell him that he has the first edition or a half-size reproduction in his apartment. He’s warmer now, but keeps the scarf on, stays close to Changkyun as they sway from side to side with the motion of the train, holding hands. Changkyun doesn’t really know how to flirt, but he talks a _lot_, his submissive shyness from their first few dates almost totally gone by now, and Kihyun’s throat could quite honestly use some hot broth by the time they’re getting to their destination; he hasn’t done this much talking since high school debate team, easily. 

The restaurant is at once hipstery and authentic, and they sit at the bar, Kihyun unwinding his scarf reluctantly and folding it up to fit into the sleeve of his coat, which he hands to a waiter at Changkyun’s suggestion. They start with gyoza, edamame, sea urchin — Kihyun has never had it before, he doesn’t think he’ll like it, but it’s the most expensive appetizer on the menu and he supposes he may as well try, and it’s briny and light and has a texture almost like solid seafoam, melting on Kihyun’s tongue. 

“I like it,” he says, and Changkyun’s eyes light up. He lets Kihyun finish the rest.

Changkyun’s table manners are lacking. Kihyun watches him as he eats edamame with his hands, which is acceptable, and licks the excess salt from his fingertips, which is not. Kihyun is going to fuck him later, he decides, and takes a mouthful of his sake, which Changkyun had selected for them. It’s cold and crisp and smooth, the sea urchin seems so much richer in comparison, and Kihyun is so— so ebullient that he can hardly sit still. It’s a good meal already, and they’re only past the appetizers. 

The udon itself is divine. Kihyun, at Changkyun’s suggestion, gets his with duck breast, a poached egg, and shredded daikon, and the broth is steaming and aromatic, warming Kihyun all the way down to the tips of his fingers when he takes a deep inhale. Neither of them can speak much when they’re eating, thankfully, but Kihyun tries to pace himself, doesn’t want to finish this too quickly, wants to savor it. The noodles are perfect, the duck cooks from blood-red to pale pink in the bowl as he eats his way through, Changkyun is good with chopsticks but Kihyun is better, and when Kihyun has eaten all the noodles and pieces of duck, he lifts the bowl to his mouth and drinks the rest of the broth, richer from the egg yolk, clean, healing, notes of ginger making his soft palate feel warm. 

Kihyun could get used to this — Kihyun _is _used to this. Their knees touch under the bar. The difference between eating instant ramen at six in the evening and then again at eleven because that’s just not enough food for him and _this _is staggering. Kihyun can’t afford not to get used to this. He gazes at Changkyun with kind, interested eyes, lovingly presses his cloth napkin against the corner of Changkyun’s mouth to catch a drop of broth, pours Changkyun another tiny ceramic cupful of sake. Kihyun’s hands are warmer now, but he still wants to hold onto Changkyun’s, especially now that his stomach is full and he’s in a generous mood. 

The topic of conversation has turned to stargazing. Kihyun is no astronomer, couldn’t care less about the physics of space, but he talks for a little while about how strange it is that some of the stars they can see — or, more often than not, can’t see, given the congested air of Manhattan — have likely been dead for centuries, if not millennia. Changkyun learned how to find Polaris when he was pretty young, he claims, and he can still do it on a clear night. It’s clear now. “I have a telescope in my apartment,” Changkyun says pensively. “I didn’t _buy _it, it came with the place, and I really don’t use it as often as I should, but. It’s there.”

Kihyun’s _in_. “I always wanted a telescope when I was a kid, but I don’t think I’d ever have used it, either,” he admits, smiling. 

Changkyun hums, glances at Kihyun, casual. “Well,” he says, “it’s pretty cloudless tonight. Want to take it for a spin?”

“I’d love to,” Kihyun says with a requisite polite blush. He doesn’t doubt that they really will try to use the telescope, but that’s not the goal here. Changkyun pays for both of them before Kihyun can even try to pretend to get his wallet out, and then they bundle back up again and head out onto the street.

The city is loud as it always is. They walk close together, holding hands, Kihyun trying not to sneeze every time his stupid touristy scarf bumps up against the underside of his nose. But he’s about to see Changkyun’s apartment, so he can endure anything, will be everything Changkyun wants and more. Kihyun’s favorite star is Altair, just because the name is so beautiful, and Changkyun prefers Betelgeuse for obvious reasons. Someone bumps into Changkyun as they walk, and immediately after, Changkyun absently pats his breast pocket with his free hand to check that he still has his wallet. Kihyun, charmed, bites back a smile and drops his forehead down to Changkyun’s shoulder for just a moment, and they keep walking until Changkyun is leading them up to a tall brick building with the ground floor windows painted to advertise an old-timey social club that either doesn’t exist anymore or never existed in the first place. Kihyun waits for Changkyun to open the door for them, but Changkyun _doesn’t_, because—

Changkyun’s apartment has a _doorman_. Changkyun’s apartment has _security cameras_ in the lobby. Kihyun shivers with glee. It’s hard not to feel like a princess when you’re dating a prince. They go inside and the doorman presses the elevator call button for them, Changkyun doesn’t even need to ask, and Changkyun thanks him and Kihyun can’t stop smiling but tries to, at least tries to hide it behind his scarf. 

It’s on the fifth floor of five floors — penthouse, Kihyun thinks to himself, and holds onto Changkyun’s arm more tightly while Changkyun inserts his key into the appropriate slot. Yes, he likes this building, what he’s seen of it so far. It’s wealthy without being ostentatious, just how Kihyun likes it, and he can’t wait to see the place itself. He’s picturing three clawfoot tubs and gold-rimmed flatware and a sofa that cost $15,000. It’s warm in the elevator, so he starts to unwind his scarf, but it gets caught in his coat, and so Changkyun has to help him. They’re kissing when they get to the fifth floor.

“It’s not much,” Changkyun apologizes as the doors open. It really _is _the penthouse — there’s not even a front door, they just arrived directly inside. And— to Kihyun’s disappointment, Changkyun is right, it’s not much at all, moody dark brick and minimal lighting, but it’s more than Kihyun has ever had in his life, so he’s not _too _disappointed.

“It’s perfect, what are you talking about?” Kihyun laughs, finishing taking off his coat, pulling off his shoes. “Are you going to give me a grand tour?”

“It would be my honor,” Changkyun says and gallantly offers Kihyun his arm, which Kihyun, giggling, takes. 

Changkyun is embarrassed about how he lives, Kihyun can tell, but the gorgeous entry foyer is clean and tidy and well-tended. He must have housekeepers, multiple, to keep him in line. The foyer leads to a huge living room, black wood shelves built-in against the exposed brick, lined with books and knick-knacks and art prints, and a flat-screen TV on a glass-legged stand. A fireplace, plants in brightly colored pots and small bronze statuettes on the mantle. There are lamps everywhere, one of which has a silk scarf draped haphazardly over it. A leopard-print ottoman. Changkyun is so frustratingly impossibly tacky, and Kihyun can’t wait to move in and pry this place away from him, bring out the potential he can see here. 

“This, um, used to be two apartments, but it got converted into one,” Changkyun explains. “I didn’t pick it out myself, some broker from the company found it after I graduated… I did my best to make it liveable, though.”

Liveable. Changkyun has the nerve to imply this place was _ever_ unliveable. After seeing how Kihyun lives? Kihyun’s smile tightens and he reminds himself like a mantra to be fucking_ nice. _“It really is perfect,” he repeats, making eye contact with a taxidermied bird. “So none of this stuff was here when you moved in, you brought it all? I love your style.”

“Thanks,” Changkyun says, his ears bright red, and leads Kihyun through to the kitchen, which is accompanied by a wet bar on the other side of the living room divider. His fridge is massive. Kihyun trails his fingers along the marble countertop and lets Changkyun show him the first of three bathrooms, this one without a clawfoot tub but with an impressive glass-walled shower.

The whole apartment is somehow minimalist and overdecorated all at once. All the walls are completely devoid of paintings or photographs or signs that say _live, laugh, love _(Wonho has one of those, or at least he used to, when he and his husband first moved into their home), but every flat surface is covered with tchotchkes and detritus, collections of scrimshaw pipes in glass boxes, ancient Greek vases that may or may not be authentic. The apartment is very quiet — the noises of the street are completely inaudible from here. 

“If I’d known I was going to have company, I’d have cleaned,” Changkyun says, apologetic again, and Kihyun frowns just a little bit, tugging on his hand to make him stop walking.

“Hey. It’s okay,” he murmurs, his other hand coming up to lightly skim over Changkyun’s cheek. “This place is so cool. You don’t have to clean for me. It’s not even messy, anyway. I bet you know exactly where everything is, right?” 

Changkyun, reluctantly, nods, and Kihyun smiles, leaning in for a small kiss. So now on top of everything, he has to mother him, too. Changkyun should be ashamed of himself. 

“The telescope is right through here,” Changkyun says, pulling away to lead Kihyun to the second living room. There’s also a small upright piano which looks antique, and of course Kihyun is practically obligated by law to ask if Changkyun plays, and of course Changkyun says yes, and of course Kihyun has to keep fucking waiting to see Changkyun’s bedroom because then they sit side by side on the piano bench while Changkyun treats Kihyun to a halting Moonlight Sonata. His hands are— Kihyun has seen worse things than this, but Changkyun’s face goes all serious and stupid when he plays, although he keeps missing notes, and Kihyun is very relieved when Changkyun cuts himself off mid-Sonata and says, “I know some Beatles songs, too,” and breaks into Lady Madonna instead. He’s not very good at it and should have stuck to his sad rich boy classical music, but Kihyun smiles along anyway, hating his own parents for not sending him to piano lessons for more than six months. It leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, this whole episode, but when Changkyun kisses him at the end of his little performance, he doesn’t seem to notice.

Changkyun runs off to get them both some wine while Kihyun checks out the rest of the living room and tries to fiddle with the telescope dials. Is Changkyun’s bedroom in the first half of the apartment? Or is it through one of those doors, there? Kihyun can’t figure out the telescope so he gives up on it and goes over to look at the books stuffing Changkyun’s shelves instead. There are quite a lot of leather-bound collector’s editions, and Kihyun is willing to bet that Changkyun hasn’t even cracked the spines on more than five of these. It’s a beautiful selection, Shakespeare and Chaucer and Jane Austen’s complete works and unabridged Victor Hugo, and Kihyun doesn’t even have to feign interest, genuinely startled out of a reverie when Changkyun comes back in with wine glasses.

“You’re better than the New York Public Library, that’s for sure,” Kihyun murmurs, gently clinking their glasses together and smiling at him. “Which one’s your favorite? Out of these, I mean. I’m not going to ask you to pick a favorite book _overall, _that would be insane.”

“It would be,” Changkyun agrees and they laugh about that as though it’s very funny, and then he gets thoughtful, looking over his selection. “I’d have to say… Jules Verne? _Around the World in Eighty Days_.”

“How many countries have you been to?” Kihyun asks with interest, slipping his arm through Changkyun’s, and Changkyun starts reluctantly listing them off as they walk to the next room, the telescope, as expected, forgotten.

Kihyun stops keeping track once Changkyun has passed twenty. Twenty countries. Kihyun has been to two: the United States and Canada, on one school trip to Toronto and Montreal. Canada barely even counts, and Changkyun can’t remember if he went to Peru four or five times. Great. They see the guest rooms first — barely decorated, and Changkyun barely uses them, he says. His best friend lives in Korea, still, and doesn’t get the chance to visit very often. Each extra room feels bigger than Kihyun’s whole apartment, but Kihyun is already thinking of matching sheet and towel sets to coordinate, his eyes are on the prize, he’s over his bitterness. No point in being jealous of what’s going to be yours in no time at all. 

Finally, after what feels like _hours_, Kihyun is almost done with his whole glass of wine, Changkyun is walking them to his half-closed door and going pink. “Give— give me a second, let me just check that it’s okay,” he says, and Kihyun smiles at him, waiting politely in the hallway as Changkyun goes into his room. Kihyun assumes he’ll have a lot of last-minute tidying to do, but Changkyun is sticking his head back out in another moment, saying, “It’ll do, come on in,” and letting Kihyun enter.

Kihyun loves it immediately. Not even Changkyun’s appalling taste in interior décor could ruin this room. There’s a strange, angular chandelier, a king-size bed that Kihyun can only describe as _sumptuous_, slate-grey cabinets built into the walls, a window directly opposite the bed and two more on the adjacent wall. It’s luxe. It’s wealth. It’s _his. _Changkyun lets Kihyun explore, and Kihyun opens the cabinet doors to see Changkyun’s clothes hung up in neat rows, equal parts business formal and, inexplicably, Hawaiian shirts. Strange looking at a bed and knowing you’re going to fuck in it later, and Kihyun touches the duvet and feels how soft it is. 

Even the exposed brick works, in this setting. Kihyun loves it. Changkyun sleeps on the left side of the bed — the pillows are dented, the sheets more rumpled. Kihyun looks away from the bed and goes through to the bathroom, which is equally luxurious, the shower twice as big as the other one, twin vanities, beautiful custom tile. _Heated _tile. The bathroom floor is heated. Kihyun holds back a moan. There’s a walk-in closet, too, where Changkyun keeps his suits and winter coats and all his shoes, which range from flimsy tennis shoes to what Kihyun is fairly sure are Louboutins (thank _God_, but they’re very clean and visibly unworn, which is a shame). 

Kihyun comes back out to the main room, to Changkyun, who’s standing there small and nervous but just a little proud of himself, eager for Kihyun’s approval. It’s odd to see the space where he sleeps — where he sleeps and, no doubt, dreams about Kihyun. This is where he’s at his most helpless, his inner sanctum, and this is how he chooses to decorate it, with a pinstripe duvet cover and a robin egg-blue bathmat. He doesn’t wear slippers, at least that Kihyun can see, but that’s something Kihyun can train him into. “It’s very you,” Kihyun tells him, leaning in for a small kiss, really appreciating that they don’t have to lean up or down to let their lips meet. “I love it.”

“Really?” Changkyun says, small, and Kihyun nods, taking his wineglass from him and setting both down on his nightstand so he can draw him in closer, kiss him a little deeper.

“It’s beautiful.” Why was Changkyun so nervous about this? Kihyun kisses him again, nudges the tips of their noses together, and Changkyun kisses the corner of his mouth, sweet and warm. “Come on. Should we go look at the moon? It’s not dark enough to see any stars yet.”

“Okay,” Changkyun says, smiling his dopiest, smallest smile, and they go back out to the second living room with a quick stop by the kitchen to refill their glasses.

The rug by which the telescope stands is plush and comfortable, and they sit on it side by side, cross-legged, as Kihyun adjusts the telescope to point out of the window. Changkyun grabs some throw pillows from the nearest couch for them to lean on — one is patterned with monstera leaves, the other is pink satin, _nothing _in this apartment matches — and Kihyun finally manages to get the moon in focus. They take turns looking through the lens, and when they tire of inventing fantastical names for all the craters they can see and then comparing them to the actual names, found in a lunar atlas Changkyun takes from one of his shelves, they end up horizontal on the rug together, Changkyun on his back, Kihyun on top of him, bracketed by Changkyun’s legs, kissing him deep and languid and exploratory.

Kihyun has never kissed anyone like this. He’s never even met anyone who likes kissing this much. Maybe Kihyun’s exes were too much like him, controlling and impatient and efficient, to draw pointless kissing out for hours, but Kihyun can tell this isn’t going to go anywhere, they’re not going to kiss until they end up fucking, Changkyun just wants to make out. Kihyun’s fingers are playing with the ends of Changkyun’s soft hair and Changkyun’s hands are curled around Kihyun’s back. They’re both warm and affectionate and a little sloppy from the two glasses of wine, and Changkyun keeps making low, throaty noises, eager for more when Kihyun pulls away for even a breath.

“Spend the night with me,” Changkyun says. “Please.”

Kihyun exhales shakily against his mouth, lifting himself up so he can look down at Changkyun, whose eyes are so hopeful, so plaintive. How far will Changkyun go to convince him? “I didn’t bring a change of clothes— I have work tomorrow.” 

“You can borrow something of mine,” Changkyun offers immediately. “Please stay.”

“None of it will fit me, silly,” Kihyun says, but he’s smiling, leans down to kiss Changkyun again. “Of course I’ll stay. You’re so sweet.”

Changkyun really must not have people over very often. Like a child finally permitted to have his friends come for a sleepover, he’s on cloud nine at the prospect of Kihyun staying the night, which bodes very well for Kihyun’s plans to be moved in here within the next two months. They go back to kissing, their tongues curling and pulling together, who has _time _for this? Changkyun kisses like he’s got all the time in the world, but Kihyun can see the countdown in his head. Kisses him again anyway as the sun starts to set, and it feels like they kiss for a full hour; Changkyun only stops because it’s getting dark and he needs to get up and turn some lights on. 

They move to the first living room and get entangled on Changkyun’s enormous couch, a movie playing on the flat-screen. Changkyun informs him that it’s a film based on a short story that’s based on another short story, and Kihyun doesn’t care enough to keep up with the plot, and Changkyun is a horrible movie-watching partner, anyway, keeps praising the cinematography and directing and not letting Kihyun watch the movie in peace. If Kihyun starts getting a little handsy, will that shut Changkyun up? It’s worth a shot, maybe, and Kihyun is thinking about Changkyun’s bed again, his shower. His mind wanders. Changkyun shuts up on his own eventually, too enthralled by the storyline unfolding in the movie to keep rambling about Dutch angles. Kihyun, to his chagrin, ends up dozing just a little, his cheek pressed into Changkyun’s shoulder, only half-asleep, and Changkyun doesn’t notice until the film is almost completely over.

When he does, though, he’s insufferably soft with him, gentling Kihyun back awake with his hands petting so carefully through his hair, kisses to his forehead, his cheeks, all his touches and movements so delicate, like he’s touching something so precious. His smile is rapturous when Kihyun fully regains consciousness, and Kihyun groans quietly, leaning up to give him another small kiss in return. Christ, he’s going to have to invest in some industrial-strength Chapstick at this rate of kissing — he’s very nearly dehydrated, too. 

“Sorry, I don’t know why I’m so sleepy,” he murmurs. “What’d I miss?”

“He went back to his family,” Changkyun says, still smiling like an idiot. 

Kihyun hums, rubs his hand over his face. “That’s great. You’re a really comfortable pillow.”

“Thanks,” Changkyun says with a blush, giving his own shoulder an experimental squeeze to test out Kihyun’s compliment. “You can go to bed, if you want to sleep more. It’s much more comfortable.”

“No, I don’t want to, that’s such a waste of time,” Kihyun says. Another kiss. “I’m going to have to spend all day away from you tomorrow. So I’d better make up for it right now, you know?”

He loathes hearing himself like this. But Changkyun adores it, like the cheesy romantic that he is, and mumbles something about how Kihyun has a point, and through a series of very bland and uninteresting flirtations, they end up in Changkyun’s room so Kihyun can try on some of his shirts until he finds one that’ll fit his shoulders. 

Sharing clothes was on Kihyun’s schedule, of course. Right around date six, actually, so he’s making wonderful time. Changkyun’s eyes go all dark as he sits on the end of his own bed and watches Kihyun unbutton his current shirt, slip it down his shoulders, then replace it with one of Changkyun’s. 

“I’ll help you with the cufflinks,” Changkyun offers, standing up and coming over. “Which ones do you like?”

He takes a box out of one of the cabinets. Some of these are ridiculous — little seahorses and four-leaf clovers and top hats, like this is a fucking game of Monopoly — but some are more traditional, and Kihyun picks a pair shaped like chevrons, liking the sharpness they’ll no doubt add to his already-sharp wrists. Changkyun is all aflutter as he puts them in for him, and considering he’s literally fucked Kihyun already, it’s very funny that he’s this worked up over doing Kihyun’s cufflinks — he’s got the personality of a child with the erotic sensibilities of a Londoner from 1854. 

“Keep them,” Changkyun says softly. Kihyun doesn’t bother mentioning that he doesn’t own a single shirt that requires cufflinks, just looks at himself in the mirror, adjusts his sleeves. The shirt is about a half-inch too wide in the chest, but otherwise they’re so similar in size, Changkyun must be much less broad than he looks. Kihyun hugs him, ostensibly to thank him for the cufflinks, actually just to check on his size. Kihyun could pin him down, if it came to that. Kihyun could hold him down. 

To return the favor, Kihyun cajoles Changkyun into doing a small fashion show of the more colorful shirts in his closet, and Changkyun obliges, red-cheeked but happy in tops patterned with palm trees and geckos, claiming he doesn’t even remember getting these, it was a phase in college, he never got around to throwing them out. Kihyun declares that he’s adorable, so cute, that yellow one really accentuates his cheekbones, somehow, and Changkyun is helpless under all this flattery. He’s having fun, Kihyun can tell, and he’s doing it in the way of someone who’s forgotten how to have fun, self-conscious and too aware of having fun, but not enough to ruin the whole thing. In another world, Kihyun might find that sweet, but as it is, it’s just a little pitiable, a little pathetic, just like everything else about Changkyun.

Everything except his finances, of course, which is what really matters.

Once they’re done playing dress-up, Kihyun hums thoughtfully and confesses that he’s starting to get peckish. Changkyun immediately invites him out to a nearby French bistro, and Kihyun accepts, and they set out again although it’s nearly midnight. Kihyun has changed back into his own clothes but Changkyun remained in one of his Hawaiian shirts just because it made Kihyun smile so much, and he looks like an absolute clown, just hysterically bad, and Kihyun has to keep from bursting out laughing every time he catches a glimpse of him. 

The bistro is gorgeous. Old-world Manhattan charm. Kihyun can’t pick one thing to order, bemoans this quietly to Changkyun, and Changkyun asks him what he’s got his eye on, then orders all three entrées, butternut squash agnolotti, steak au poivre, grilled trout, without even giving Kihyun a second to reconsider. 

“Changkyun,” Kihyun chastises, his cheeks hot, presses their shoulders together. They have a booth table, but they’re sitting on the same side anyway, not wanting to be apart.

“What?” Changkyun says innocently, smiling down at him. It’s abundantly clear by now that he likes being generous when it comes to Kihyun — that’s a very, very good sign. 

“You’re just so—” Kihyun acts like he can’t come up with a word, although he can come up with quite a few, none of them particularly laudatory, and shakes his head, bashful, leans up to kiss Changkyun on his dimpled cheek. “Thank you.”

Changkyun presses his hand under the table and can’t wipe the smile off his face. They only end up finishing one of the entrées — the rest they take to go.

On the walk home, they hold hands, and Kihyun is starting to realize that he, in fact, hates holding hands. He’s never noticed that before, and as usual, it’s because of the stark differences between Changkyun and everyone else Kihyun has ever dated. Holding hands is so lovey-dovey cutesy, something done only by teenagers and old people in movies, and it’s just not for Kihyun at all. It’s not something he likes to do, clearly. Changkyun’s hand is sweaty as ever, but Kihyun can’t let go now, not even when they go through Changkyun’s apartment building lobby and wait for the doorman to call the elevator down. That, at least, is never going to get old. 

“I should shower,” Kihyun says regretfully. “Can I— is that okay?”

“Of _course_,” Changkyun says, looking very nearly offended that Kihyun had asked for permission. “I’ll get you a towel.”

The towel is monogrammed. Kihyun stares at the embroidered letters for a good ten seconds, eyes unfocusing, then blinks up at Changkyun and smiles, sweet. “Thank you. I’ll be quick, but—” He hesitates, and his smile gets a little sharper, a little more sneaky. “Feel free to join me any time.”

He relishes the way Changkyun’s eyes go round and his cheeks flush red, then goes into the bathroom and leaves the door unlocked for ease of access, turns on _both _showerheads, the water pressure is _divine_, stands there letting steam build up on the glass walls for five minutes or so, then reaches for one of Changkyun’s expensive shampoos. The finest money can buy — no wonder his hair is so soft. Midway through rinsing, he hears the bathroom door click, and turns around to see the blurry shape of Changkyun, naked already, entering the room.

“Come on in, the water’s fine,” Kihyun says, raising his voice just slightly to be heard over the rush of the shower, and Changkyun, blushing but happy, steps inside, shivers at the first contact of near-scalding water on his skin. “Is it too hot?”

“No, it’s nice,” Changkyun says, blinking water out of his eyes, and Kihyun leans just slightly to the side to let Changkyun catch more spray from the diagonal showerhead. Changkyun rests one hand on Kihyun’s waist, the other pushing his hair back from his face, and when he’s done with that, he leans down for a small kiss, their mouths softened and made slick by the water, by the steam. And then he pulls away, Kihyun nestled against his side with his arms looping around Changkyun’s hips, and draws a heart with his index finger in the steam on the shower wall. C+K in the middle. _Awful_. Revoltingly cheesy. Kihyun coos in adoration, hides his face in Changkyun’s shoulder, lets Changkyun tip his face up with a careful finger under his chin to kiss him.

Shower sex feels very correct for where they’re at in their relationship. Kihyun slides his tongue into Changkyun’s wet mouth and skims his hands down Changkyun’s back, and Changkyun, seeing what’s going on, pulls Kihyun closer by the hips. They’re more eager to touch each other now, after spending the whole day together, two days, even, and when Kihyun runs his hands up and down Changkyun’s back again and lets his nails catch just slightly, Changkyun shivers, making a quiet noise into Kihyun’s mouth. Their hips line up near-perfectly, so Kihyun can feel it when Changkyun starts to get hard, but he’s being very different yet _again_, not as active, letting Kihyun chase him instead of the other way around. Kihyun can work with that. He touches him with intent, with purpose, like he can’t wait to map out every inch of his body, his neatly manicured hands running over Changkyun’s chest and thumbing at his nipples, which makes Changkyun emit another choked-off sound and press closer to him. 

Kihyun presses Changkyun back against the glass wall of the shower. While it’s heated up slightly over the course of the few minutes they’ve been in here, it’s still cold, and the change in temperature makes Changkyun moan weakly and cling to Kihyun’s shoulders as Kihyun kisses him, tilts Changkyun’s head up the way Changkyun did for him just now, mouths and sucks down his neck. Teeth this time, but not enough to hurt, barely enough to sting, just to give Changkyun some sensation. Changkyun has already given him a hickey — it took four days to fade completely — but Kihyun’s not a big fan of that, so he moves on, kisses over where his heart is beating under his skin, then comes up to kiss his mouth again and slides his hand between Changkyun’s legs.

Changkyun is being so _useless_. All he does when Kihyun starts stroking him off is moan more, his cock twitching warm and heavy in Kihyun’s palm, and he whimpers when Kihyun breathes, “You’re so hot,” his big hands running adoringly over Kihyun’s back and hips and waist, squeezing his ass temporarily but not lingering. Kihyun could do anything to him, he’s starting to realize, and it’s almost too much choice, too much power— he can’t decide where to begin. He’d suck him off, but then he’d get water in his eyes, so he stays where he is, strokes him a little tighter, glances down to watch Changkyun’s hips jerking helplessly forward into Kihyun’s hand. Changkyun reaches for him, too, and Kihyun moans into the curve of Changkyun’s neck, shows off just slightly, leaning into how pornographic it is to get your hands on your lover in a shower as gorgeous as this. His free hand slides around to the back of Changkyun’s head and they kiss with so much tongue, and Kihyun _finally _puts the pieces together, why Changkyun’s been being so weirdly shy, his nervousness the whole time he was giving Kihyun a tour of his apartment, this melting, sensitive way he’s letting Kihyun kiss him and touch him and stroke him. Changkyun, it seems, is in the mood to get topped.

Now that Kihyun knows this, he treats him accordingly. Kisses him deeper, lets his strokes get more teasing, drawing the skin up and down the length of Changkyun’s dick until Changkyun is really just panting into his mouth, so turned on and wanting so _much_. Kihyun has to keep reminding himself to be tender, not to tease him too much, and he’s not used to being this sweet, he doesn’t really know how. Well, this will likely be a learning experience for them both. Kihyun stops stroking Changkyun — Changkyun makes a noise like he’s been shot — and reaches over to turn the water off, and they pull each other closer to keep from catching a chill as the shower near-immediately gets several degrees colder.

“Why’d you stop?” Changkyun whispers, hoarse, and Kihyun nudges his lips against the corner of his mouth, and Changkyun moans, opens up to kiss him back.

“Wanted to take you to bed,” Kihyun murmurs, all bundled up in Changkyun’s arms as Changkyun is in his, and Changkyun’s cock pulses against Kihyun’s hip. Changkyun looks almost pretty, like he’s been crying, his lashes wet from the shower and his lips red and full, and Kihyun kisses him again, guides him out into the bathroom, where they both towel off haphazardly just to keep from dripping all over the bed. Changkyun can’t tear himself away from Kihyun, reaches for him pitifully every few seconds, and finally Kihyun tosses both their towels to the floor and takes Changkyun’s hands, pulling him to the bedroom, to Changkyun’s gorgeous bed.

They burrow under the sheets, still cold from the traces of water evaporating from their bodies, and Changkyun gasps when Kihyun presses right in against him, their legs slotted together, and kisses him hard, his thigh rubbing against Changkyun’s dick. Even though he’s shivering, Changkyun’s hands are as hot as ever, and when they’re under his covers the heat gets unbearable very quickly, the whole-hearted devoted intense way he kisses Kihyun, like he’s moments away from dying, like Kihyun is all he has, it’s too much, Kihyun can’t breathe. And _he _was meant to be in control this time, anyway. So he pulls away again, pushes the covers down, and asks, “Do you want me to fuck you?”

Changkyun, dark eyes enormous, nods. “There’s— fuck, ugh, hang on,” he says, blushes, wriggles away from Kihyun and gets out of bed to pad over to one of the cabinets lining the walls. He’s not a virgin — that much is, unfortunately, very clear by now — but it’s clearly been a while for him and he had the nerve to assume they wouldn’t be fucking tonight; that’s why his sex accoutrements aren’t so easily accessible. 

“You’re so gorgeous,” Kihyun sighs, watching him walk, eyes trailing over the curve of his back and his strong shoulders, and he knows how he looks when he wants to fuck, his eyes bright, cheeks flushed high, and the effect on Changkyun when he turns back and sees Kihyun’s face is palpable. He blushes even harder, tumbles back into bed, lets Kihyun move him how he wants him, easier to manipulate than he looks. Which isn’t saying much — he looks extremely easy to manipulate. All Kihyun means is that he’s not clumsy when Kihyun is in control. He rolls over onto his back, parts his legs, and lets Kihyun run his hand up the curve of his thigh, spreading him open. 

Changkyun can’t stay still. He’s squirming and shuddering, jumpy, and Kihyun soothes him, pets his thighs and his hips and the lines of his waist, wants to convey that he’ll never hurt him, that he’ll be so gentle. Ha. When Changkyun has relaxed enough to let Kihyun slick up a finger and press it against his hole, they’re kissing again, and he’s lulled, breathing soft and uneven into Kihyun’s mouth. Kihyun wishes he could be like this all the time, noisy without being talkative, pliant, so yielding under Kihyun’s touches. He trusts Kihyun so deeply. He’s giving himself over so completely. This is a very promising start. Changkyun moans and presses against him, begging for solace, when Kihyun stretches two fingers inside him, and Kihyun kisses him again and again to remind him that he’s here, he’ll give him what he wants and so much more. 

Changkyun, Kihyun is starting to learn, does like it wet. Each time Kihyun refreshes the lube on his fingers, he gets a little more desperate, pleading with his eyes, shivering at the slightest touch. His cock is flushed red and standing proud against his stomach. Kihyun steals his breath from him, works him with his fingers until Changkyun is mewling, so strange in that deep, velvet-rich voice, but it affects Kihyun deeply, makes him— makes him want. He wants, and Changkyun is willing to give, has none of the reservations Kihyun has about begging— he’s been begging this whole time, actually, hoarse whispered “please” and “more” and “more, _please” _punctuating every other breath. 

Kihyun has never claimed to be a good person. He sees Changkyun for what he is: a warm, willing hole to fuck, something glitzy to play with then discard. Changkyun doesn’t see it that way, but it doesn’t matter how he sees it when he’s moaning like this, wet and helpless into Kihyun’s shoulder. “_Please_,” he says again with so much urgency that one would think Kihyun had been edging him for days, not thoughtfully and thoroughly prepping him for fifteen minutes. Kihyun kisses him until they’re both dizzy, helps Changkyun push a pillow under his hips, then gets lost in his mouth, sucking on his lips, licking into him, but he’s starting to get impatient, too, he’s been needing relief this whole time and very nearly forgot, what with all this soothing and soft loving crooning and petting he’s been doing. 

Changkyun never looks away as Kihyun rolls a condom onto himself, lines up, starts to press inside. His heavy eyelids flutter but he doesn’t look away, even when his head falls back he strains to look at him. Kihyun tries to hold it together, tries to go slow, can’t take it with Changkyun looking at him like that. So he looks down instead, watches the places where their bodies meet, wraps his fingers around Changkyun’s cock and pulls up on him even and loose, just enough that Changkyun trembles and wraps his legs around Kihyun’s waist and coaxes him in. His hair is flopped out appealingly against the bed and he has the ghost of a red mark on the curve of his shoulder, and he’s all Kihyun’s for the taking, his fruit to pluck, so completely vulnerable. He’s _so _vulnerable. He makes Kihyun feel vicious. Kihyun’s pressed into him fully, and Changkyun is moaning and lifting his hips, drawing Kihyun in deeper, and Kihyun leans down to kiss him. 

Christ, he’s loud. Not even _loud_, just so vocal, gasping and sighing and groaning low in his chest when Kihyun fucks him just right. His arms are wrapped around Kihyun and his eyes are still open, he wants to _see_, he’s so hungry for everything Kihyun is giving him. As far as getting fucked goes, he’s pleasantly responsive, tight and wet around Kihyun, just flexible enough, and it feels _good_, it’s been a while for Kihyun, too, and he kisses down Changkyun’s gasping throat and tells him he feels amazing, tells him he wanted this all week, he likes Changkyun so much, everything about him, makes Changkyun giggle while he’s buried deep inside. 

“You’re perfect,” Changkyun tells him, eyes starry, distant, visions of far-off planets swirling through his pupils as Kihyun fucks him.

“Nobody’s perfect,” Kihyun quips, his hair damp against his forehead, and Changkyun laughs so breathlessly, kisses Kihyun with that breathless smile, he’s so charmed, he’s so completely under this spell Kihyun is casting on him, and his legs are tight around Kihyun’s waist as Kihyun fucks him, deep and steady and sure. 

Kihyun wishes this were either more or less boring. As it is, he’s on a knife’s edge of arousal, so distracted and enthralled by the way Changkyun throws his head back and moans, but so uninterested in the tender touches to his shoulders and hips. He can’t relax and get used to the comfortable mediocrity of missionary sex, and this isn’t as intense as their first time, pressed too close on Kihyun’s bed, but it is… something, Kihyun has to reluctantly admit, the sheer amount of trust Changkyun is placing in his hands as he gives himself over to him. The way he’s arching up off the bed and staying so present, loving every second, not a single wince of pain, every angle is the perfect angle, every touch is the hottest yet, he’s _so _involved. He keeps making these ridiculous breathy noises. Next time they do this, Kihyun is going to have to bend him over — it’s too much to be able to see his face. His mouth is too red, there’s just _something _about it, Kihyun wants to— he doesn’t even know. For now, he leans in to kiss him like Changkyun wants him to so badly, and Changkyun is moaning into his mouth as he strokes himself, faster and tighter than Kihyun had been doing it, but still with some of that lush sensuality Kihyun keeps catching glimpses of, taking the time to slide his fingertips over the head of his dick on the up-stroke, until he’s painting his lower stomach white and moaning so obscenely.

God, it’s not a competition, but Kihyun feels like he’s been outdone. He rushes himself to a conclusion, panting against Changkyun’s lower lip, hips pushing into him more urgently until he’s spilling into the condom, tight, harsh waves of pleasure jolting through him. Manageable, nothing mindblowing. They catch their breaths for a while, and Kihyun pulls out and off of him, feeling appropriately fuzzy around the middle. Changkyun is pretty good at getting fucked. By the time Kihyun has disposed of the condom and is coming back, Changkyun has turned onto his side, his ribs rising and falling with his breaths.

“Spoon me,” he mumbles, small and dozy.

Kihyun grits his teeth but slides in behind him, his arms looping around his waist. Changkyun is too warm, too sweaty, for this to be comfortable, but he just wants to be held, and Kihyun kisses the nape of his neck and makes him shiver. “You’re so sweet,” he says softly. “Are you okay, was that okay? Can I get you anything?”

Changkyun shakes his head. “You make me feel so good,” he rasps, and Kihyun knows he’s not just talking about the sex. His hand finds Kihyun’s on his stomach, and he laces their fingers together, raising them up until he can press a kiss to the side of Kihyun’s fine-boned wrist. 

Kihyun expects that’ll be the end of it. Changkyun is tired and worn out, the last time they fucked he passed out almost immediately, but of course it’s not that simple; of course Changkyun wants to lie all tangled up in the sweaty sheets and talk. Kihyun doesn’t even know what they’re talking _about_. Their fingers are linked, they’re pressed together so close, and Changkyun’s voice is croaky and soft and they’re just talking for the sake of hearing each other. 

They talk until they can’t anymore, and Kihyun acts loath to pull away so he can set his alarm for tomorrow morning. He can tell that Changkyun wants him to play hooky, but that’s not something Kihyun can afford to do yet, and Changkyun doesn’t ask, anyway. He just enfolds Kihyun in his arms when Kihyun returns to him, eventually falls asleep with his face pressed into Kihyun’s angular shoulder. Kihyun could suffocate him to death, just like this. But he could just as easily fall asleep, too, and he does that instead, too warm but sinking into the divinely comfortable mattress, Changkyun a steady weight against his side.

Kihyun’s sleep is dreamless. They have as lazy of a morning as they can, given that Kihyun has to be at work in an hour. Changkyun whines quietly and clings to him to try and keep him from getting out of bed, but eventually gets up, too, kisses Kihyun with his morning breath and then heads through first to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee, then to the bathroom to shave. He looks very incorrect with shadowy morning stubble, and Kihyun hates the way it feels scratching against his cheek. He somehow hadn’t noticed it the first few times they’d slept together; maybe it just grows in very slowly. Changkyun rejoins Kihyun smelling fresh and with shaving foam on the collar of his soft t-shirt, and Kihyun kisses him again, lets Changkyun pour him some coffee that no doubt costs at least $20 a cup, all told, ends up stumbling out of the door with barely fifteen minutes to get to his office because Changkyun wouldn’t stop kissing him. 

What an exhausting weekend. Kihyun is smiling and smiling as he walks out, cheeks pink, walk unsteady from how love-struck he’s meant to be, but when the elevator doors close, the smile drops. He takes in his first real breath in two days, straightens out his shirt collar, straightens his posture again. All smiles again in the lobby, thanking the doorman, and out on the street he’s back to his regular self once more, can’t get away fast enough. He shoves his way onto a train, rubs his cheeks to relax his smile-tired muscles, checks his email, catches up on all he’s missed in the real world while he was being held hostage by Changkyun’s fantasies of playing house. 

He makes it to the office seconds before nine, gets settled at his desk, makes sure his facial expression is adequately dreamy. He has to text Changkyun to make it seem like he’s on his mind, he knows that, but he doesn’t _want _to, he’s so fucking relieved to be away from him, even being at work seems better in comparison. Silver linings, he supposes, and gets out his phone once he’s caught a few more breaths.

_What an amazing weekend. Feels like a dream_, he texts.

Changkyun replies immediately — he must have been waiting. _I know, I don’t want to wake up_, then _I miss you already_, then a picture of Changkyun in bed, just half of his face visible, the sheets around him unkempt. Is Kihyun meant to feel something? Endeared, maybe, or turned on? Really, he’s just disappointed but not surprised that Changkyun got back in bed after going through Kihyun’s whole morning routine with him. He had an opportunity there to get up and start his day properly, but of course, simple pleasure-seeking creature that he is, he just got back in bed. 

Kihyun replies: _So go back to sleep, babe! Sorry I had to wake you up so early xoxo. _He really, really hates what he’s having to become for Changkyun’s sake, but if this is what Changkyun wants, this is what Changkyun is going to get.

Changkyun doesn’t reply for a few minutes and Kihyun thinks maybe he’s off the hook, but then Changkyun texts a lunch invitation, wheedling Kihyun’s precious solitude away from him, and of course Kihyun accepts. Changkyun is so fucking _needy_. Kihyun has never dated needy before. He replies that yes, he’d love to, and presses his forehead into the cold wood of his desktop. It’s going to be a long year.

_MONTH 3_

“Um,” Changkyun says, “sorry, I know you’re at work, I’ll make this quick, but I kind of need a fast answer.”

“You’re making me nervous,” Kihyun pouts. 

“It’s nothing bad,” Changkyun assures him, a smile in his voice. “So. I have to go on a business trip to LA next week. For three days.”

“Oh.” Kihyun waits for the appropriate length of time, then lets himself sound a little sad. “Oh, okay. Well, I hope you have fun?”

He’s been spending three nights a week at Changkyun’s, pretty much. They meet up for lunch every day during the week, and from Friday to Monday, he sleeps over at Changkyun’s apartment. He can’t do it during the week because Changkyun is notoriously bad at letting him go in the mornings, so Changkyun had to reluctantly stop whining about missing Kihyun during the week — since Kihyun was late so many times that his boss actually made a remark — and let Kihyun stay at his own place on work nights. At any rate, they’ve been seeing an awful lot of each other. Operative word being awful. Kihyun hates spending this much time with another person, but he knows that this is how it has to be. Three days off will be a very welcome reprieve, and he can’t wait for some peace and quiet, finally, some isolation, some room to be alone with himself and remember who he really is, maybe he can take a long bath, catch up on all the books he’s been meaning to read, maybe—

“Come with me,” Changkyun says, and Kihyun scrunches up his face in disgust.

“What?” he says, surprised, breathy. “To LA? _Next week?”_

“They waited until the last second to tell me I even had to be there, I swear I didn’t procrastinate this,” Changkyun laughs. “Literally, I just got off the phone with the COO, they’re gonna book the tickets and the hotel tonight. Do you want to come? Please say yes. I hate business trips and I hate LA and I’ll miss you so bad.”

Kihyun also hates Los Angeles, but he’s not about to admit that he agrees with Changkyun about something. Besides, Changkyun’s Kihyun probably likes LA, likes the sunshine and the creative atmosphere. The beach. He hesitates again, bites his lip, starts to smile. “…Okay,” he says. “Yeah, I’d love to come. Just— what days? I have a ton of sick days saved up, so that’s not an issue, I’ll just… call off, I guess.”

“Thank God,” Changkyun exhales. The phone crackles and Kihyun, frowning, tilts his head away. “Tuesday to Thursday. Go figure, right? They couldn’t have done it on a weekend? Then we could have stayed longer. Gone to Malibu or something.”

“Mmm,” Kihyun says. “That still sounds so nice, though. Of course I’ll come. Thank you so much? For inviting me? Just let me know how much the tickets are, and I—”

“_Kihyun_.”

Kihyun bites his lip again, and this time his smile is more real, and much more self-satisfied. “Okay, okay. Sorry.”

“I’ll forward you all the information as soon as they book it,” Changkyun says. “I’ll call you right back, okay? I’m just gonna tell them I’m bringing a plus-one.”

“I’m going into a meeting,” Kihyun says apologetically, looking right at his blessedly empty Google Calendar. “So I’ll just call you after work.”

“Oh, okay! Good luck! I— talk to you later!” Changkyun says, and Kihyun repeats after him dutifully, then hangs up.

Los Angeles. Impulsive getaway trip. Hm. Kihyun did notice that Changkyun very nearly said I love you and then cut himself off; he’s done this a few times in the past week, actually. Part of this is circumstance — Kihyun is willing to bet that Changkyun read all the same articles that he did a few months ago about when the “right” time to say it is, and the perfect situation just hasn’t come up. Some of this is due to the fact that they’ve been doing a _lot _of fucking, having successfully gotten over that week-long dry spell from when they first started dating, and sweet hopeless romantic Changkyun must feel weird about saying the big L right when they’re both in the afterglow. 

The sex is — is something. Kihyun wasn’t quite expecting it to be the way that it is, and he’s had to recalibrate. He was right in his assessment that Changkyun just likes to feel good, because Changkyun _really _likes to feel good, doesn’t do anything halfway. He’s a perfect switch — doesn’t seem to prefer topping or bottoming, is so enthusiastic about everything. Loves giving and getting head. Loves doing just about anything with his mouth, really. And Kihyun isn’t _bad _at giving oral, but Changkyun is so _good _at it that it almost makes Kihyun feel self-conscious. Changkyun can do things with his mouth that Kihyun could never even have imagined, that don’t even seem anatomically possible; Kihyun can never really focus when Changkyun gets his mouth below Kihyun’s belt, but sometimes it’ll feel like he’s sucking on the head and tonguing over Kihyun’s balls at the same time, it’s beyond overwhelming, Kihyun would resent him for it if he didn’t benefit from it so greatly. He hasn’t gotten around to seeing if Changkyun can get off just from giving a blowjob, but maybe they’ll try it in LA.

Kihyun’s phone buzzes and surprises him out of his thoughts, which is definitely for the best. It’s a message from Changkyun with a flight confirmation — they’re going out on a red-eye very early Tuesday morning, getting back late Thursday night. The hotel confirmation comes a few minutes later, and Kihyun looks up the name and is pleased to find that not only does a penthouse room cost around $5,000 a night, but apparently, the Château Marmont (how _delicious_, to stay in a hotel that is, in fact, a château) “has a reputation as a place to misbehave.” Good choice on Changkyun’s part. It’s even in West Hollywood. Were it up to the company, they’d probably just be at the Ritz, but this place has Changkyun written all over it. 

_When you’re done with your meeting come over for lunch & a quickie I miss you, _Changkyun texts, and Kihyun rolls his eyes, his good mood ruined. Getting together for lunch is one thing — this is another, and of course he says yes, but he’s not exactly _happy _about it. 

Changkyun’s doorman knows Kihyun by now, but Changkyun still has to send the elevator down to him, which takes some of the fun spontaneity out of getting together for an afternoon delight. One of these days Changkyun is going to have to give Kihyun a key, probably, and then Kihyun’s plan can advance. Changkyun is just— so much needier than Kihyun expected, like an extremely delicate houseplant or a puppy with intense separation anxiety, but at least now he knows how to ask for what he wants. It was so tiring, having to take initiative all the time in the early days of their relationship, but now Changkyun makes whiny little demands and Kihyun gives in every single time, lets Changkyun chase after him and cajole him into coming over constantly, but then he treats him to thousand-dollar dinners, hundred-dollar lunches, he’s so generous with his money that it’s _stupid_. Kihyun loves it, but Changkyun, he contends, should still be ashamed of himself. 

Changkyun is half-naked already when the elevator deposits Kihyun on the fifth floor, and Kihyun’s all smiles immediately, pulling off his shoes, slipping out of his jacket, coming forward to pull Changkyun in close. “No office today?”

“Wasn’t in the mood,” Changkyun says. He’s in _some _kind of mood, already getting handsy, leaning in to kiss Kihyun’s neck, so happy to see Kihyun that one might even think that they didn’t just see each other less than 24 hours ago. 

“Lucky me, then,” Kihyun smiles, winds his fingers through Changkyun’s hair, kisses him. “Are we really going to LA?”

Changkyun makes a low, pleased noise, kissing him back. “I’m whisking you away.”

“I’ll tell my boss to file a missing persons report,” Kihyun giggles, letting Changkyun pick him up like he’s in a romantic comedy, twirl him around, then set him down so they can keep kissing. “Nobody’s ever kidnapped me for an LA getaway before. Will you send me your business itinerary? So I can plan stuff for us to do?”

“Let’s not talk about plans,” Changkyun says, which has a stronger negative effect on Kihyun than rat poison has on rats, it’s the worst kind of turn-off, but then Changkyun kisses him harder, his big hands warm on Kihyun’s waist through the fabric of his button-up, and Kihyun gets a little distracted. They stumble, kissing all the while, to Changkyun’s living room, topple over onto his couch, and Kihyun crawls into his lap, sucking on the soft skin under Changkyun’s ear while Changkyun works on undoing his shirt buttons and his belt.

Changkyun is generous with more than just money. Any time he gets his hands on Kihyun it’s like the _only _thing that matters in the whole world is Kihyun’s pleasure. He’s just so fucking eager to touch him, to make him moan, and Kihyun can’t fake it, never gets the chance to, not when Changkyun is kissing him so deeply, flipping them over so Kihyun is laid out underneath him and Kihyun can see that he’s already hard in his jeans. Why the fuck was he wearing jeans, no shirt, at home? Christian Grey wannabe. Kihyun knew it. He slides his hand down over Changkyun’s dick, sucks at his lower lip, groans when Changkyun ruts down against him and grinds their hips together. 

“You’re so— I love— this,” Changkyun says, breath heavy. That had been a close call. He’s kissing at the corner of Kihyun’s mouth, presumably to distract himself from his near-slip.

“I do, too,” Kihyun admits, a little shaky, rocks his body up against Changkyun’s again, but Changkyun shakes his head.

“_This_,” Changkyun says, kissing the edge of Kihyun’s lips again. “You have a mole right here. It’s so hot. I think about kissing it all the time.”

Kihyun goes bright red. No artifice, unfortunately. “Hey,” he protests weakly. “It’s nothing special. I used to put concealer on it in high school—”

Changkyun makes a vehement noise. “Never do that again. I love it so much. Literally, you’re so fucking kissable, I can’t look at it without wanting to just—” He kisses Kihyun full on the mouth, licks into him, slides his hand down Kihyun’s pants and swallows his resulting moan.

It’s strange, being on the couch. Kihyun is used to having more room to roll around, but while this couch is huge compared to other couches in the world, they’re still very spatially constrained, and Kihyun’s hips jerk up against the touch of Changkyun’s hand. “Do we have time to fuck?” he breathes.

“You tell me,” Changkyun murmurs into his mouth, and Kihyun struggles out from under him to see the large grandfather clock in the corner of the room. 

“…If I’m late _again,_ you’re gonna have to come answer to my boss yourself,” he threatens, but they’re both giggly when they go in for another kiss. “You said quickie, let’s make it quick.”

“Okay,” Changkyun says, so eager, so earnest, yanks the rest of Kihyun’s clothes off and can’t hold back a moan when he sees Kihyun’s hard dick. “Can I—”

Kihyun barely manages to keep from rolling his eyes. “Yeah, of course,” he says, sighs out a high noise as Changkyun slides down onto the ground, onto his knees, sucks Kihyun into his mouth. His multitasking ability is _incredible_. Kihyun is fully down his throat and Changkyun’s other hand, the one not toying with the base of Kihyun’s dick, is searching in the couch cushions for the condoms they stashed there last week for situations just like these. Kihyun squirms, his head spinning a little from how fast he got hard, and experimentally pushes his hips up, which makes Changkyun moan around him. Kihyun reaches down, pets over Changkyun’s hair, then gets— not _mean_, but curious, presses his thumb to the latch of Changkyun’s already-stretched lips, and Changkyun’s whole body shudders as he tries to open his mouth wider, take in Kihyun’s thumb along with his cock. 

Hot. Kihyun’s thumb, inside Changkyun’s mouth, is caught between his own dick and the line of Changkyun’s teeth, and Changkyun is whining around both, slicker than usual, salivary glands working overtime, his cheeks are so red. They won’t get around to fucking, Kihyun realizes, then pushes the condom out of Changkyun’s hand and casts one of his legs over Changkyun’s shoulder instead, hoping he’ll get the hint. He does. Changkyun pulls his mouth off and does that _thing_, that thing that makes Kihyun’s stomach flip over but unfortunately not from revulsion, where he just spits into his hand, then presses his fingertips against Kihyun’s rim, just barely still pliant from the hour they spent fucking last night. 

Kihyun whines and Changkyun answers him with a low, throaty noise of his own, licks Kihyun back down, circles his fingertips over his hole. His other hand is elsewhere, but Kihyun can’t focus on trying to figure out where it is when Changkyun is suckling right where Kihyun feels it most, getting all sloppy, and it’s unclear whether Changkyun is bobbing his head or Kihyun is fucking up into his mouth, but either way, it feels amazing, only made better by Changkyun’s blunt fingertips pressing just right to give Kihyun the impression of fullness without needing to actually be filled. 

Changkyun really does suck cock like a whore. Kihyun had mistaken his enthusiasm for lack of technique, once, but this _is _his technique, just being absolutely filthy with it, letting the thick head of Kihyun’s dick sit on his tongue while he pulls back for breath, then swallowing him down again and tilting his head so Kihyun will push and stretch his cheek, the one where he has that arrogant dimple. It’s obscene, almost cartoonish, but he’s not even putting on a show, this is just how he does it. Kihyun is starting to get close and he whimpers out a warning, combs his fingers through Changkyun’s hair, and Changkyun doesn’t slow down or stop, doesn’t speed up, either, keeps going at that exact same level of intensity and devotion and desperation until Kihyun is moaning and arching up off the couch and coming down his throat.

Changkyun pulls off and swallows hard, twice. He’s a wreck. His eyes are so starry and Kihyun crawls down from the couch to be with him, pushes his hand between his legs and feels that in his jeans, he’s so turned on he’s twitching, and Changkyun moans so loud, hides his face in Kihyun’s neck. 

“You love doing that so much,” Kihyun murmurs, fond, warm, and Changkyun is panting so harshly into his skin, hips jerking helplessly against the pressure of Kihyun’s hand.

“Yeah, but— it’s— it’s that it’s _your_ dick, it’s _you_,” he explains, choking on his breaths. “Love making you feel good.”

“I feel so good,” Kihyun promises, doesn’t even have to lie. He tilts his head down, ghosts kisses along Changkyun’s jaw, which is clenched so tight with the effort of keeping himself restrained. Changkyun is never better than when he’s about to come, because he can’t even talk, all he can do is moan and cling to Kihyun, nonverbally beg him for mercy, and Kihyun doesn’t even have time to pop the button of his jeans and give him some real relief before Changkyun is going rigid against him, gasping roughly against his neck, then shuddering and going still.

Kihyun experimentally pets his fingers down the hard ridge of Changkyun in his jeans and Changkyun trembles, making such an embarrassed noise and hiding his face in Kihyun’s chest. It’s nearly cute, how irresistible Changkyun finds Kihyun. Kihyun kisses the side of his head and wraps his arms around him and Changkyun hugs onto him in return after a few seconds, his breath evening back out. “You’re so amazing,” he mumbles.

Kihyun smiles, gently nuzzling the tip of his ear through his hair. “I didn’t even do anything. Wanna meet me at mine after I’m done with work?” He’s only asking on a whim, but he knows Changkyun will love it, and he _sure _does, lifting his head to look up at him with his sex-dazed, radiant eyes.

“So we can plan our trip?” Changkyun says, not even teasing, genuinely offering, and Kihyun tweaks his ear with his fingertips.

“Yeah. And maybe get dinner. I’m in the mood to go out, I’m tired of my own cooking.”

Changkyun nods and leans up to kiss him, and then of course they kiss forever, until Kihyun remembers that he really _does _have to go back to work and scrambles to get dressed again. Changkyun watches him so forlornly as he pulls his pants on and re-buttons his shirt, and they kiss against the metal frame of the elevator door until the elevator arrives and Kihyun, blessedly, takes his leave.

Being the object of someone’s obsession is… interesting, he decides as he gets comfortable in the backseat of the UberBlack Changkyun called for him. It’s clear that it’s not all sexual on Changkyun’s part; two weeks ago, they went on a date to a bookstore and talked themselves hoarse over literature, it’s not like Changkyun isn’t totally enchanted by the personality Kihyun has crafted for him. It’s just an interesting experience. Being wanted so completely. So totally. All-encompassing desire, and it’s for a person who doesn’t even exist. Changkyun is so fucking stupid. Kihyun laughs all the way back to work, but quietly, so the driver doesn’t think he’s insane.

On Saturday they have plans as well: dinner at the Russian Tea Room, then a concert at Carnegie Hall. Changkyun’s suggestion, and he’d been so casual about it, too, acting like he’d completely forgotten that he had season passes just wasting away and not like he’s just trying to impress Kihyun with how cultured and lofty his tastes are. Another prix fixe menu, and this time Kihyun lets Changkyun feed him black caviar from a delicate mother-of-pearl spoon. They’re both dressed up, for _once_, thankfully Kihyun had a suit for the occasion, and when they’re done with dinner, they walk across the block to Carnegie Hall. Changkyun not only has season passes, he has his own _box_ — “My parents really had a lot of friends,” he says, as apologetic and shy about it as ever — and they sit comfortably in the plush velvet seats, holding hands, Kihyun looking through tiny ornate opera glasses at the string quartet onstage. Kihyun has never been to a concert at Carnegie Hall before; he’s never been to the Metropolitan Opera, either, as much as he’s wanted to go. At intermission, he leans over to Changkyun as they walk down to the lobby to get some champagne, and asks if Changkyun doesn’t happen to have “season passes” to the opera, too, and Changkyun, beaming with his whole childish face, says he can certainly get some.

It’s too early to say for _sure_, but Kihyun is feeling pretty fucking good about his plan. 

Monday night he sends an email to his boss saying that he’s come down with a nasty stomach bug and won’t be able to come in tomorrow, and he packs a small suitcase full of t-shirts, summer pants, sunscreen, a book or two to read, then comes to Changkyun’s apartment. They’re flying commercial, but _first class_. “I’ll take you on the jet next time,” Changkyun apologizes, “it’s getting refurbished right now.” Barely acceptable. First flight out, 5:33 AM, so they go to sleep as early as they can, which ends up being ten. They have to be up at three so they can leave at four. It doesn’t feel quite real, it really is like something out of a movie, not real life— Kihyun’s boss thinks he’s puking his guts out, but really Kihyun is snuggling up with his multimillionaire fake boyfriend, tangling their legs together as they fall asleep. Changkyun sleeps the whole way to the airport, too, in the back of the hired private car, but he still holds Kihyun’s hand even in his sleep. 

First class is divine. Kihyun wishes they weren’t leaving this early so he could really enjoy it, but as it is, he’s exhausted, and he lies back in his resplendent first-class airplane seat, sips his freshly-squeezed orange juice, smiles wanly over at Changkyun across the edge of his chair — Changkyun is just gazing at him, lovesick and barely awake — and falls asleep. This is _worlds _away from flying in a cramped seat in coach, knees knocking against the back of the seat in front, surrounded on both sides by sweaty, chatty day-trippers or businessmen, and Kihyun feels so at home, so perfect. When the plane is landing, flight attendants bring them heated towels rolled up into neat little spirals. Kihyun blots his face and upper neck, watches the approach of the Pacific Ocean out of the window. Flying first class is wonderful for so many reasons, and a big one is that the seats are simply too far apart for him and Changkyun to be able to hold hands or even talk much. Changkyun still seems half-asleep, anyway, blinking owlishly at Kihyun from behind his frail wire glasses. 

They go to the hotel first. Changkyun has to make a cursory appearance at some meeting, but then he’s free for the rest of the day. Their penthouse is _beautiful_, right at the top of one of the château’s turrets, and Kihyun strips off and gets right into bed, stretching all his limbs out and sighing in ecstasy. 

“Do you really have to go?” he murmurs, reaching out a hand for Changkyun, and Changkyun comes over to the bed, leans down to kiss the backs of Kihyun’s knuckles.

“Just go to sleep, babe. I’ll be back when you wake up, you won’t even notice I was gone.”

“Of course I’ll notice,” Kihyun whispers, turns his hand over so he can brush his fingertips over Changkyun’s cheek. 

Changkyun leans down and kisses him. Kihyun can tell that it’s taking a hitherto unsuspected amount of willpower to make Changkyun actually capable of leaving right now. But he does leave, after a significant amount of kissing and insisting that Kihyun get room service the second he has any sort of craving. Finally, he gets out, and Kihyun buries his head in the king-size down pillow and takes in a big lungful of air and falls into one of the best sleeps of his life, comfortable and worry-free and so fucking expensive. This nap Kihyun is taking, if he divides it by the cost of this hotel per night, is worth at _least _$400. Or more, depending on how long he manages to be out for. 

In fact, he ends up falling asleep too deeply to be able to keep track. When he wakes up, Changkyun is sprawled by his side, his mouth just barely open, his youthful face smooth and carefree and brainless. Kihyun purses his lips and blows out over him, a narrow stream of air just to tickle him and make him squirm, and sure enough, Changkyun’s face scrunches up and, not quite awake, he lifts a hand to bat uselessly at his nose. Kihyun bites back a laugh and gets out of bed, wraps up in the plushest bathrobe he’s ever seen, looks out of the window over the Hollywood Hills. 

Across the continent, his office is open for business already, but Kihyun is here. He calls the room service number and gets a breakfast banquet for two, and when Changkyun wakes up they have breakfast in bed, kissing occasionally over slices of fresh fruit. Then a private car takes them to Santa Monica, to the beach, and they get late afternoon cocktails at some A-lister bar; the waiters pay more attention to them than to Mila Kunis, who’s sitting in a corner booth with a friend. Soon all of this will be Kihyun’s— his to _keep_, his to enjoy on his _own_ terms without Changkyun always nipping at his heels. Tomorrow they’ll go to the Getty, and tonight Kihyun has grand plans to swim in the hotel pool for at least half an hour, tongue-kiss Changkyun in the jacuzzi, then make him get them thousands of dollars’ worth of room service just like Lindsay Lohan did when she stayed at this same hotel. 

They go to the Getty. Changkyun offers in all seriousness to take him to Rodeo Drive and let him loose, but Kihyun has to wrinkle his nose in distaste and say that’s not his scene at all. They go to a different beach this time, one that’s far more private, and Kihyun hand-feeds Changkyun cotton candy, laughs when Changkyun laps playfully at his fingertips. Changkyun doesn’t look good in sunglasses — his vulnerable eyes, one of his only tolerable features and even that’s inconsistent, have no effect whatsoever when concealed. Kihyun strategically left one shoulder less protected by sunscreen than the other, and when they’re back at the hotel, he lets Changkyun lovingly, carefully rub aloe into the reddened areas. 

“Well,” Kihyun says when all that’s done with, leaning his head back and smiling a small, coy smile at Changkyun, “I know you didn’t just invite me along with you so you could get room service and slather aloe all over me.” After all, other than their first three dates, this is the longest they’ve spent together consecutively without having sex, and it’s not like Kihyun hasn’t noticed. 

Changkyun, gratifyingly, goes pink. “I also didn’t _just _invite you along to fuck,” he defends. He leans in to kiss Kihyun, but stops himself from kissing him more deeply. “You— you know I like you for more than just your body, right?”

“Changkyun,” Kihyun says, ignoring the small frisson of pleasure he gets from such a sincere, unintended compliment. His body’s not all that. He sits up straighter, looks back at him, reaches up to touch his cheek. “Of course I know that. You make that very clear, baby.”

But it’s not enough — Changkyun isn’t appeased. Or something else is up. He’s tense and shifty, covers Kihyun’s hand on his cheek with his own sweaty one. “I just really want to make sure you know that,” he says, much softer, sounding so much younger and sadder when his voice gets this quiet. “I mean, I… Kihyun, I’m falling in love with you.”

_Yes_. Oh, Kihyun could cheer out loud. Something animal and powerful inside him coils up tight and begins to glow, a savage joy sparking up through his midsection. This is half the battle won — he can picture the headstone, half-engraved at first, then completed. Fuck — he’s let the silence go on for too long. He’s composed in a split second, eyes going wide, lips forming a round O of surprise. “Changkyun, I—”

“You don’t have to say it back,” Changkyun rushes to say, his cheeks reddening further, but his posture’s not getting defensive — he’s clearly comfortable enough with Kihyun that he doesn’t feel the need to hide from him, even when he’s saying something this significant. “I just— it’s just another one of those things that I just wanted you to know. So I could get my… intentions across.”

Kihyun sits up more. He moves closer to him, tenderly caresses his cheek, looks at him with warm, unfathomable eyes. “I’m falling in love with you, too,” he whispers. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”

“I’ve never met anyone like you, either,” Changkyun says, then realizes what Kihyun said and flushes bright pink. “You— you are?”

“How could I help it?” Kihyun says and leans up to kiss him. Changkyun’s lips are soft from surprise and he makes an unsteady noise, then kisses Kihyun back, slow and passionate, drawing Kihyun in closer. 

Not the kind of kiss that leads to slow and passionate sex overlooking the Hills, though. Not one of those. Kihyun won’t even get laid tonight — Changkyun, ever the romantic, just wants to cuddle and bask in the glory of their newfound love. All the curtains on their massive windows are thrown open wide so they can watch the sun setting, and tonight they just talk about their hopes and their dreams. When Changkyun was little, he wanted to be a star athlete, so his parents could watch him on TV and say that they were proud of him. Kihyun, even from a young age, knew that all he wanted when he grew up was to be rich, but he tells Changkyun that he wanted to be a detective. 

Box checked. Metaphorically, of course, not literally. Kihyun didn’t bring his Murder Moleskine with him — he’ll strike this off the list once he’s back home. They go on a midnight adventure once they’ve had enough kissing and tender petting and gazing into each other’s eyes. Changkyun calls the chauffeur, trying to stifle his giggles as Kihyun kisses his shoulder and playfully bothers him, and then they’re off to the beach again, then late-night drinks at a speakeasy, then up into the hills to look out over the city and the ocean. Changkyun paid the driver to leave them alone for an hour or so, but they don’t even _do _anything, they just sit there, holding hands, speaking to each other in soft lovers’ voices. It’s sickeningly dreamy. People aren’t meant to do this outside of grainy music videos by indie bands pretending to understand life and love. “I feel like I can talk to you about anything,” Changkyun murmurs, his head leaned sweetly against Kihyun’s shoulder, and Kihyun kisses the crown of his skull and tells him that he can. 

When they get back to the hotel, it’s very nearly four in the morning. Their flight tomorrow isn’t until the evening, but Kihyun is still privately angry that they’ll have to sleep in, that they’ve preemptively wasted the day. But they don’t end up waking up too late, eleven isn’t bad at all, and Changkyun is amusingly sleepy and useless once they’re up, stumbling around their hotel room and missing a button when he does up his shirt to prepare for the last meeting he has to go to. Kihyun redoes it for him, kisses him, says he looks so handsome, sends him off to his work commitment and himself goes down to the hotel restaurant. Charges everything to the room, sits at the table with the very best view, finally gets to read his book. The waiters are so kind to him. Changkyun joins him after a couple of hours and Kihyun tilts his head up and lets Changkyun kiss him, and Changkyun asks if Kihyun is sad that they didn’t get the chance to go out today, and Kihyun says of course not, he likes to be a homebody sometimes, especially when home is _this_.

Their flight is in a few hours, so they go back up to their penthouse to pack. And end up getting distracted, _finally _Kihyun sees some action, but they have to be quick, which is fine by Kihyun. Changkyun is always eager and hungry for attention, and now that he’s been untouched for three days it’s _so _much worse, he’s a mess before Kihyun can get his hands anywhere near him. They’re pressed so close on the plush chaise in the sitting room, Changkyun is gasping wet against Kihyun’s mouth, Kihyun likes it when he sounds near hysterics, his rumbling moans vibrating warm through Kihyun’s lips when he kisses down the side of his neck. Kihyun generally enjoys the anonymity of a hotel room, wondering about how many other people have fucked here, lets Changkyun put Kihyun in his lap and push deep into him. The angle they’re at means that Kihyun can see the view over Changkyun’s shoulder when he’s fucking himself on Changkyun’s dick. This is satisfying in a new way, Kihyun can’t get enough of it, hates Changkyun for making them wait so long to do this, until it’s almost too late, and leans down to nibble at Changkyun’s ear and keeps his eyes fixed on the endless horizon. Considering it’s been a few days, Changkyun lasts remarkably long, but not so much that Kihyun’s patience runs out. Changkyun is hot and hard inside of him, Kihyun is filled to the brim, and he digs his fingers into Changkyun’s shoulders and comes, staring greedy out over the city, the hills, the ocean, the whole world, all of it his kingdom. 

Loose-limbed, warm-faced, and giddy in early love, they pile into the back of the final hired car of the trip and set off for LAX. “We’ll come back,” Changkyun promises, always so extra adoring after he tops, brushes soft kisses over Kihyun’s browbone and his cheek. The corner of his mouth, where he likes to kiss so much. “Whenever you want. Just say the word.”

“You’re so silly,” Kihyun whispers, manages to make it sound like a compliment, tilts his head down to catch Changkyun for a proper kiss. He’s sore, but he knows the flight will be wonderful. First class. Kihyun will never have to pay his own airfare ever again, he realizes, and the thought makes him feel so wonderful that he kisses Changkyun the whole rest of the way to the airport.

Complimentary champagne; hot towels; even airplane food is good in first class. Kihyun reads an in-flight magazine, watches a movie, reclines his seat until it’s completely horizontal and grins up at the ceiling. When can he talk Changkyun into letting them go on an overseas trip? The flight might be more fun than exploring their destination. But Changkyun doesn’t seem to handle travel well — his face is colorless and he very quietly tells Kihyun that he kind of has a headache, and Kihyun croons sympathetically at him, reaches across the divider between their seats so he can massage Changkyun’s temples with his cold fingertips. Given how his parents died, it’s somewhat understandable that he has plane-related discomfort, but come _on_. The flight attendants gave them _slippers _when they boarded. Kihyun pets Changkyun’s hair until they’re starting to land, and Changkyun seems a little better, although residually grouchy. Kihyun won’t let Changkyun rain on his parade, cheers him up by murmuring, “Do you think we could convince Ladurée to deliver?” while they’re waiting at baggage claim, and Changkyun hugs him around the middle, his headache seemingly cured instantly by the prospect of treating Kihyun to an expensive and nonsensical dinner. 

He really is like a child. Loyal like a spaniel. All he does is follow Kihyun around and _look _at him. How long was his longest relationship before this? How did anyone endure this without the guarantee of future financial security, which is the _only_ thing making it tolerable for Kihyun? They go back to Changkyun’s apartment, shower separately, then cuddle up in bed and discuss, smiling all the while, what their favorite part of this little mini-vacation had been. Changkyun’s was going to the museum; Kihyun says his was the beach, at midnight. And Kihyun, tired of his company, also says that he should sleep sooner rather than later and under _no _circumstances can he be late tomorrow, he has so much work to catch up on. Changkyun whines, but only a little, and they fall asleep fitted together like puzzle pieces, lock and key, mismatched magnets, and all other things so cliché.

Kihyun did miss a lot of work. The issue with putting himself through the circus of Changkyun is that his only reprieve is the office, but he _hates _his job, his coworkers, his duties, so he’s truly stuck between a rock and a hard place. If the rock were a sentimental, gullible plutocrat and the hard place were a mediocre advertising firm. And he still has to pretend to be getting over a disease of some sort, so he coughs theatrically when his boss walks by and hopes the effect of the bags under his eyes outweighs the healthy post-LA glow his skin very obviously has. 

He’s swamped, honestly, all these clients to contact and reports to read and data to go through, and he completely misses the way his phone has been buzzing for the past two hours until he takes a water break and checks his notifications. Changkyun’s sent him a picture he took in Santa Monica, the sun playing on the ocean, with a sad little message about how he misses this, then a text about how he misses Kihyun, hopes he’s having a good day at work, and then: _Are you hungry?_

Oh, yeah, it is lunchtime, Kihyun supposes. Thankfully, he really is too busy to meet Changkyun out for lunch, so he replies that he’ll get something later, sorry, he’ll see Changkyun after work. Then goes back to his desk and stares at numbers until his eyes are blurring.

He’s practically motionless for so long that his back and shoulders and wrists are starting to hurt, his desk chair nothing like the resplendent beds he’s been lounging around in for weeks. The emails he’s sending get shorter and shorter, snippier as they go along, because he doesn’t have the patience to babysit this junior manager through navigating his first account, why is Kihyun the _only _competent person in this office, and he’s crafting the most incisive passive-aggressive progress report the world has ever seen when something moves in his peripheral vision, a hand knocking politely on the wall of his cubicle, and, irritated at the interruption, he jerks his head up to see Changkyun wearing a very stupid denim jacket and an even stupider facial expression.

Kihyun blinks, then blinks again, even more irritated that he’s not an apparition, he’s really in front of Kihyun’s desk. “What are you doing here?” he says, altogether too blunt and harsh, then abruptly remembers he’s _docile_, he’s _sweet_, he’s so happy to see his loving Changkyun, who came to cheer him up because he’s having a hard day. He softens his face, closes his laptop, starts getting up. “I mean— don’t you have work? Babe!”

“I brought you some soup,” Changkyun explains, evidently unfazed by Kihyun’s momentary lapse into sincerity, and winks at him conspiratorially. “Since you’re still not feeling well.”

“Awww, oh, my gosh,” Kihyun says, taking the container from him. Who the fuck let him in? One of the interns, probably. Kihyun has _several _phone calls to make once Changkyun leaves. He leans in to kiss him on the cheek, quick and shy, not wanting too many of his coworkers to see, just enough. “I can’t believe you came all this way.”

“Of course,” Changkyun says, looks so genuinely happy to see him, so happy to have made Kihyun happy. “I’m not gonna distract you from your work, you can get back to it, just— you need to eat.”

Kihyun nods, setting the takeout containers on his desk and smiling at Changkyun. “I can take a little break. Want to see the place?”

“I’d love to,” Changkyun beams, as though this wasn’t his plan all along, smug sneaky son of a bitch, can’t go a single day without sticking his oversized nose in Kihyun’s business, and Kihyun comes out of his cubicle to lead Changkyun through the office. 

“That’s creative,” he murmurs, “that’s accounting, that’s my boss’s office, that’s the intern zone, that’s tech, and I’m back over there, with the rest of analysis. Is it how you pictured it?”

“It’s better,” Changkyun says, looking at Kihyun’s mouth. He’d better not try any funny business — Kihyun wants people to know he’s in a relationship, yes, but he also has a reputation to maintain, and he will _not _permit Changkyun to screw that over for him. So he steers him out of the curious view of everybody else in the office, back to Kihyun’s mostly-enclosed cubicle, where they just smile adoringly at each other for as long as Kihyun can stomach.

“Should I go?” Changkyun asks after a few minutes of this. “Will you walk me out?”

What, is he going to get lost? They’re only on the second floor. Kihyun nods, takes his hand again, and starts to leave, telling him again how sweet he is for bringing Kihyun some food, how thoughtful, and of course they’re fucking interrupted by one of Kihyun’s most loathed coworkers: Stupid Sarah. Not her legal name, but it may as well be. 

“Kihyun! I was just looking for you! I’m _so _sorry for that mix-up with the fliers, I just got back from the printer’s, it’s all better,” Stupid Sarah snivels, and Kihyun’s smile and grip on Changkyun’s hand tighten. 

“No worries,” he says, although of _course _there are worries, and as soon as Changkyun is out of the door, he’ll be tracking her back down and telling her in great and painstaking detail about exactly how thoroughly her career is ruined. 

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she says, and looks significantly at Changkyun. “Who’s this?” 

Bitch. “My boyfriend brought me some soup,” Kihyun says, very gently bumps his shoulder with Changkyun’s, watches Changkyun’s face bloom from neutral to the most delicate, most rapturous joy. Even though Kihyun’s professional life is a disaster, at least he still has the utmost control over _this_ area of his existence.

“I didn’t know you had a boyfriend!” Stupid Sarah squeals, and Kihyun hates her, hates everyone looking at them right now, hates that he can see the ecstatic, moronic smile on Changkyun’s face out of the corner of his eye, he’s having such violent thoughts, he needs to get them out of there before he says something he regrets.

“Yeah, well, I’m full of surprises,” he says. “Come on, babe.” 

“Nice to meet you,” Changkyun says in his most horrible, most sincere, warmest voice, he’s so _happy_, and Stupid Sarah has the nerve to wave her insipid hand bye-bye as Kihyun leads Changkyun out of the office.

Kihyun can breathe easier when it’s just the two of them. Balancing his fake persona for Changkyun and his fake persona for work simultaneously isn’t possible, considering they’re at such odds. He smiles at Changkyun, pushes his hair back from his forehead, leans in for a kiss. “Are you headed back to the office?”

“Didn’t go in today,” Changkyun shrugs. “What’s the point, right?”

Oh, great. Kihyun’s life is probably about to get a whole lot harder. “Lucky you,” he murmurs and kisses him again. “You’re so sweet for coming, Changkyun. You really cheered me up so much.”

“We can have a super relaxing night when you’re done,” Changkyun promises, his cheeks all pink from the praise. “Um, I hope you like the soup.”

“I’m sure I’ll love it,” Kihyun says between kisses. “You picked it for me, after all.”

Changkyun makes a small mumbly noise, embarrassed but pleased, and just hugs Kihyun for a moment. “See you later?”

“Mhm. Have a good day,” Kihyun says, and then, just to really seal the deal, adds — voice soft, eyes soft, everything soft, “I love you.”

Did Changkyun forget or something? He’s blushing so hard, can barely look at Kihyun, leans in for another kiss while Kihyun smiles. “I love you, too,” he says, quiet and ardent, and they kiss again, and then Kihyun watches Changkyun, red through to the tips of his ears, amble on down the street to the nearest subway station, headed back home.

The soup is delicious. Kihyun eats the whole container and drily declines to comment on his personal life for the remainder of the day.

_MONTH 4_

Changkyun’s been going to work less and less lately. Maybe because it’s summer. When Kihyun leaves for his office in the morning, Changkyun more often than not stays in bed, getting up only to follow Kihyun to the door and kiss him goodbye, then getting horizontal again. It’s a miracle he manages to get up to meet Kihyun for lunch — Kihyun has started having to say no when Changkyun just invites him over, because he _always _ends up being late when they do that — since it seems like he’d rather just be in pajamas, his hair all over the place, shuffling around his apartment in his socked feet and watching arthouse films all day long. How his apartment manages to stay so pristine when Changkyun obviously doesn’t clean it, Kihyun isn’t quite sure; he hasn’t seen maids around yet.

Kihyun wears short-sleeve polo shirts and Changkyun brings exotic lunches to his office, sometimes. They saw _La Traviata _at the Met, and Kihyun teared up at the appropriate moments. Another thing Kihyun did last week was rip all the pages out of his Moleskine, burn some of the more incriminating and less relevant ones in his bathroom sink. The rest, he folded up and tucked into some books he hasn’t had occasion to read for a while. His lease is ending soon, which he hasn’t forgotten, but he hasn’t brought that up with Changkyun yet. It’s unlike him to wait until the last second to do anything and all this is making him nervous, an itch in the middle of his spine that he can’t quite reach, because if Changkyun doesn’t take the hint, or if he does but says no, then—

No. That’s not an option. Changkyun has gotten used to having him around, he says so himself, every damn morning when he wakes up alone Kihyun gets a bothersome little text about how strange it is to not have Kihyun clinging to him — as _if _Kihyun cuddles in his sleep — and Kihyun’s over there four nights a week, now. This is foolproof, and Changkyun has continued to be the biggest fool of all, but Kihyun is confident in himself. It’ll work. It has no choice but to work. 

Something funny about Changkyun is that, intentionally or not, he really _is _trying to be Christian Grey. This past weekend, he took Kihyun along on a _helicopter tour _of the city. Had surprised him with the invitation, then backtracked immediately, stammering, cheeks pink, saying, “I don’t— I don’t know how you feel about heights, but I’m way better in a helicopter than I am in a plane, I thought it could be fun—”

“Baby,” Kihyun had said, so endeared and touched and amazed, taking his hands to hold. Pet names don’t come naturally to Kihyun, he had to write down in his Moleskine to pepper them into his daily speech so he’d remember, and Changkyun loves it every time, shutting up immediately and going even pinker. “Baby, you don’t need to keep trying to impress me, it’s okay. I’m impressed, I promise.”

“Just because we’ve been together for a little while doesn’t mean I don’t still want you to have a good time!” Changkyun had defended, and Kihyun had gotten _such _a thrill from Changkyun saying they were together, not just ‘dating,’ that he’d leaned in for a deep, passionate kiss, his arms winding around Changkyun’s shoulders. He’s so stupid that sometimes it’s not even _fun_, but Kihyun was very much looking forward to quite literally soaring above the commoners of Manhattan, and not even Changkyun’s trite sappy idiocy could ruin that for him.

In the end, it had been a good time after all, Changkyun’s grip on Kihyun’s hand too tight for a man who had just been insisting that he’d done this plenty of times before. The city had been enchanting from above, glittering, compact, Kihyun couldn’t look away. All his most significant trials and tribulations had taken place just below him, just there, and the best was yet to come. Changkyun had very nearly cried afterwards, but not from fear, he insisted, just from relief to be back on the ground, and Kihyun had held him, petted his hair absently, thanked him over and over for taking Kihyun on such an unbelievable journey.

As far as kinky multimillionaires go, though, unfortunately Changkyun is far too needy and far too uninteresting to be the star of his own media franchise — nobody would pay money to see “50 Shades of Im.” Mainly what he does is ramble a lot, bother Kihyun a lot, and give Kihyun a _lot _of oral. Kihyun asks him, one night, if his dimples have names, and they spend a whole hour giggling and going through baby name websites to try and pick some out. It’s sickening. 

Changkyun says he loves Kihyun about a thousand times a day. Kihyun has to respond in kind. Has Changkyun never been in love before or something? He sure acts like it, buying flowers for Kihyun nearly every week. Kihyun doesn’t even know where to put them all. Most of the time they wilt quickly, filling Kihyun’s apartment with their rot-sweet stench, which clings to his clothes for the whole rest of the day. The same way Changkyun does, actually. Permeating. Kihyun wants to wash himself clean, but every time he manages to steal back a few hours of peace, he just has to reunite with Changkyun again, let him smother him with his kisses and hugs and gifts, small, cheap little things that clutter Kihyun’s desk at work and his apartment, but gifts nonetheless. When Changkyun is dead, Kihyun will be able to get himself gifts. Things he’ll actually like. Platinum bracelets and first-edition Dickens. Not stuffed animals and Swarovski crystal snowglobes. Who does Changkyun think Kihyun is? Kihyun adjusts himself accordingly. That’s all he’s been doing. Now it’s Changkyun’s turn. Kihyun can only hope that he’s up for the challenge.

It’s a slow night. Kihyun’s been distracted and pallid all day, watched Changkyun with affectionate but wan eyes at lunch, and when they’re finally back at Changkyun’s apartment when Kihyun is done at the office, Kihyun curls up against his side, laptop balanced on his knees, while Changkyun reads a book. “Are you sure you’re okay?” Changkyun asks again — he’d asked literally an hour before, God, he’s so fucking annoying — and Kihyun sighs, looking up from his computer at Changkyun.

“Yes, sorry. I’m just a little tense,” he says. “Just… trying to figure out my living situation.” He gestures to his computer screen; he’s had Zillow pulled up for thirty minutes now, but Changkyun has evidently been too engrossed in his collection of Vonnegut short stories to notice until now. 

“Your living situation?” Changkyun repeats, frowning. “What about it?”

Kihyun shrugs one shoulder slightly, clicks on another studio apartment three blocks away from his current place. The rent is $50 lower. “My landlord called me this morning, um. My lease is up in a couple months—” That’s a lie, it ends in three weeks— “and he wanted to know if I was going to renew, but he’s hiking the rent up. So I’m trying to find a new place, and it’s kind of— kind of a last-minute thing, so I’m just stressed about that. I promise I’m okay, though.”

He can practically hear the stupid hamster starting to jog in its gilded wheel inside Changkyun’s otherwise empty head. “So what are you thinking?” he asks slowly.

“I don’t know,” Kihyun sighs. “I like living there, the location is so good, but— I mean, you’ve seen it, it’s… small. And I hate my neighbors. It’s _not _worth two grand a month, and he wants to raise it to twenty-two hundred, which is _not _going to happen. I guess I could look for a nearby two-bedroom or one of those co-op things people keep writing thinkpieces about, but—”

“Just— why not just live here?”

Kihyun counts to three. Closes his laptop very slowly. Looks up at Changkyun, making sure his face is the perfect cocktail of incredulous, confused, happy. “What?” As if to say maybe I misheard you. We’ve been together for _four months_, you fucking buffoon, it’d be insane if we moved in together, are you serious? You love me that much? You have _no _idea what I’ve got in store for you. For starters, I’m getting rid of that painting in the second living room. And you’ll be dead within a year. Thanks for the rent-free luxury living, though. 

“I mean—” Changkyun has bloomed a deep, embarrassed red, but he keeps his arm around Kihyun, his other hand coming up to rub his nose. “I mean, okay. Look. I know it’s too soon for us to, like, ‘move in together,’ you know? But I’d— I’d do this for any of my friends, if they needed a place to stay.”

“Ah,” Kihyun says, incredibly amused. God, he’s really shooting himself in the foot here, and Changkyun has that same realization at the exact same time, going even redder and rushing to backpedal.

“No, I mean, of course it’s different, obviously it’s different,” he rushes to say. “I love you, I want to help you, but I just— I know we haven’t, by _society’s_ standards, I know we haven’t been together long enough for you to move in with me, so it doesn’t have to be like that. You can have your own room, you know I have plenty of extra— you like the west-facing one, right? That can be yours. I won’t bother you. You can just stay here for as long as you need to, if you want to get another place for yourself that’s fine, just… please don’t live in some shitty two-bedroom with some stranger. You can live here.”

Changkyun would give him his _own room_. Selfless, moronic Changkyun would give Kihyun a room of his very own, not even insist on sharing a bed with him every night so Kihyun could have his privacy, his autonomy, so as to avoid any sort of imbalance of power due to Kihyun living under the glossy wing of his hospitality. Kihyun blinks once, twice, and says, “Why would I need my own room?”

A brief silence hangs between them, and Changkyun plucks it down. “I— I mean,” he says, his eyes flickering to Kihyun’s mouth. “I don’t know. I don’t know why I said that.”

Kihyun shifts his laptop to be next to him on the couch and slips into Changkyun’s arms instead, winding himself around his body. “Why wouldn’t I just be in your room, with you?” he murmurs, almost leaning in for a kiss but stopping a hair’s breadth away. 

“Is that where you want to be?” Changkyun breathes, and Kihyun nods, kisses him, sinks his fingers into his hair and kisses him, until Changkyun is pink and making soft, helpless noises like squeaks every time Kihyun moves in his lap. “Kihyun— is that a yes?”

“I’m saying yes to moving in with you,” Kihyun says carefully, “not to being your roommate. So it’s only a yes if you’re okay with me fucking you every day, because from what I remember of living with a roommate, that’s not typically what it—”

Changkyun makes a breathless, intense noise that’s as much laugh as it is moan and kisses Kihyun so hard, his arms wrapping around Kihyun’s waist and keeping him so close. They’re smiling too much to kiss at first, but then they remember how it works, Changkyun’s hands searching on Kihyun’s waist and Kihyun licking so deep into his mouth. As usual, all Changkyun’s touches are so desperate, like he’s scared Kihyun will float away if Changkyun’s grip isn’t tethering him down, and Kihyun matches him in intensity, sucking on his bottom lip and making a shaky sound into his mouth.

“When?” Changkyun pants between kisses. “When do you want to— to move in? I’ll take care of all the logistics, but— I just want you to be here every night, is it too soon to move next weekend? I could find a moving company that wouldn’t mind the short notice, so—”

“Let’s not talk about plans,” Kihyun says, and kisses Changkyun through all his giddy laughter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/paratazxis) (+ tip jar link therein, if interested), [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/paratazxis), [official playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/12MLmAfM9PhFB63N7EWMww?si=yQVn9E5ZR_-1vJVLkdfFFg), [More Fun playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4uy2Cl1pvB2ebqD4mUEJ75?si=26jS0Ry5SmyqOP3TqGegmQ)
> 
> thank you so much for reading!!!! i hope you’re all having a great autumn :’’) please let me know what you thought of this chapter (and of the story so far, and maybe of what you think will happen next????) by leaving a comment or coming to chat on twitter/cc (and pls use #foolproofao3 if you want)!! i’ll be so happy to discuss theories or answer questions or just to talk abt how much i love murderverse kihyun :/// once again i really am amazed by how many people enjoyed the first chapter, hopefully you’re still enjoying it, my pride and joy!!!! 
> 
> **i will be updating this on the last friday of every month, **so i will see you guys again on **december 27. **pls feel free to subscribe if you want an email update! have a wonderful holiday season, stay murderous out there!! 


	3. Months 5-12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cohabitation; a false alarm; Kihyun ages another year; a proposal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for this chapter: brief mentions of murder methods incl. physical violence and gun violence, offscreen minor character death, and suicidality
> 
> this is a wild one folks!!!!! i sincerely hope you enjoy!!!!! also as a disclaimer, once again, kihyun's opinions of his friends do not reflect the author's opinions of the members of monsta x nzjfbksdjbk

_MONTH 5_

“So are you going to carry me over the threshold?” Kihyun says, beaming at Changkyun, his eyes sparkling.

Changkyun shakes his head, cheeks pink and thoughtful, and gives him a bright, bashful smile in return. “Nah, I’ll save that for when we’re— uh, for later,” he says, fumbling his sentence to a halt, but Kihyun can complete it for himself; he’ll save it for when they’re married. 

Kihyun’s smile brightens, and he tugs Changkyun in by the middle, tilting his head to the side so they can kiss. And they kiss in the doorway for a long time, until Changkyun’s phone rings and he has to pull away to answer it, mouthing to Kihyun that it’s the moving company.

Kihyun hadn’t had many things to pack up, in the end. After Changkyun had invited him to move in, only two weeks had passed before all Kihyun’s boxes were taped shut and the moving truck was pulling up in front of Kihyun’s building. Changkyun, dutiful, loyal boyfriend that he is, had come over quite a few times to help Kihyun pack his mugs and books and jackets, and when he’d asked Kihyun if he was going to miss this place, Kihyun had outright laughed, unable to help it. 

“Would _you _miss it?” he’d asked. He can’t even imagine that Changkyun had consented to live in a dorm while he was at Columbia; he’s used to a certain standard of living, after all. 

“I’m going to,” Changkyun had replied, with a significant look at the bed, and Kihyun had laughed again, pushed playfully at his arm and chastised him for being one-track-minded. Then, of course, they’d ended up all tangled in the sheets, Kihyun rutting helplessly against Changkyun’s thighs while Changkyun sucked a red mark into the skin of Kihyun’s neck, but things very frequently end that way with them. 

And now here they are, in Changkyun’s apartment which is now Changkyun-and-Kihyun’s apartment. They try not to get in the way as the movers bring up the laughably small collection of boxes and Kihyun’s one valuable piece of furniture, his antique mahogany nightstand, and every time Kihyun tries to go help, Changkyun just gives him a palliative look, pats him on the hand, and tugs him back down to sit on the couch with him. 

Kihyun had already had a toothbrush here. Now he has his own toothpaste here, too. He and Changkyun unpack one box of his clothes and spend the rest of the evening distracted, they can’t stop hugging and kissing and giggling. Changkyun, blushing as usual, admits that he’s never lived with a partner before, which really doesn’t bode well for Kihyun’s sanity in the coming months, and Kihyun says he’s only done it once, that Changkyun seems like he’ll be a natural. There’s not much to it, anyway. Kihyun will get them matching slippers this week and get rid of that obnoxious fucking painting the week after. Everything is coming along wonderfully.

Milestones keep piling up, in fact. Kihyun doesn’t bother with the checklist anymore, he just keeps track in his head. He can see that Changkyun falls more in love with him every single day, and it’s even stronger now that they live together, now that Changkyun wakes up to him each morning. One bright Saturday, Changkyun joins Kihyun in the kitchen, says, “What do you want to do today?” and when Kihyun turns around with sparkling eyes and says he kind of wanted to go to Coney Island, Changkyun is delighted like a child by the prospect of slumming it with the commoners for a day. He even wears one of his Hawaiian shirts; sky blue with inexplicably orange flamingos and green palm trees. It’s hideous. 

“I love it,” Kihyun says and grabs a handful of the collar to haul him in for a kiss. 

Changkyun gives Kihyun a pair of sunglasses to wear for the day. They’re Chanel. Kihyun sits perfectly still as Changkyun daubs sunscreen onto his face with infinite, humiliating tenderness, then returns the favor, running a fingertip down the line of his nose and leaning in for a kiss when Changkyun isn’t expecting one. Changkyun makes a surprised noise but kisses back, and it’s up to Kihyun to keep them from getting distracted, so he has to pull away before Changkyun’s hands can stray higher under Kihyun’s light linen tee.

As soon as they get to Coney Island, Kihyun realizes that he’s made a horrible mistake. The _entire _population of New York, if not the world, seems to have come on this day, and they’re sweaty and grubby and noisy, knocking Kihyun with their reeking shoulders and treading on his feet. But Changkyun’s optimism is unflagging — he’s just so happy to be there, that his charming boyfriend, so full of pluck and _joie de vivre_, wanted to go to an amusement park today, that even though said boyfriend is going to be 30 soon he still has a streak of youthful exuberance in him. So Kihyun puts on a brave face and forces himself to enjoy the experience. 

Changkyun’s parents don’t seem to have had any friends here, but money talks, so they cut every line Kihyun wishes to cut, for rides, for food, everything. Neither one of them wishes to go on the Ferris wheel, so they don’t bother. They spend twenty dollars at a dinky little photobooth because each time it prints a photostrip for them, they can’t decide which of them should get the privilege of keeping it in his wallet, and they’re both too gracious to insist. In every photo, Changkyun is smiling so much, and Kihyun’s eyes are warm and soft, his whole body inclined towards Changkyun’s. They’re kissing in half of them, too, and in Changkyun’s favorite, his fingers are sticking up behind Kihyun’s head like bunny ears — Kihyun had been too distracted trying to tickle him so he’d shriek for the photo to notice. 

While Changkyun is off getting them cotton candy, pink for himself and blue for Kihyun, Kihyun takes photos with a disposable camera he’d bought earlier that afternoon, some shots of the sky, some of the water, some of Changkyun wearing a very stupid sun visor. It’s a very hot day, so they’re both in shorts, and Changkyun keeps running his hand soothingly over Kihyun’s legs whenever they’re sitting down, curling his fingers around his ankle if he can reach. Changkyun looks very out of place in summer clothing, but Kihyun knows that he does, too, and so forgives him for it, reapplies sunscreen to that big nose and then permits Changkyun to hand-feed him cotton candy so he doesn’t have to get his fingers sticky. 

Talk about a teenage dream. Only children do this. Children and tourists. Kihyun is neither, so he resents the whole experience, resents how hot he is, even when Changkyun gets them frozen mojitos. But he reminds himself to be patient, not to snap at him even though he’s so irritable today that he keeps imagining pushing children off the edge of the boardwalk when they scream too much, to relax even though he’s wound so tight. Yes, this had been a mistake, but as long as Changkyun is having fun — and he is — then that’s another metaphorical box checked. 

Changkyun likes roller coasters. Kihyun does not. Kihyun goes on the Cyclone with him anyway, holds his hand so tightly Changkyun is wincing by the end of the ride and rubbing his fingers and waving away Kihyun’s soft, fluttering apologies but letting Kihyun kiss his wrist, the center of his sticky palm. How much fucking longer are they going to have to be here? They get funnel cakes, but neither of them can finish, there’s simply too much powdered sugar. Changkyun gets some on the corner of his mouth and Kihyun kisses him though he tastes appalling, all sappy-sweet and sunscreen-sweaty, and finally Changkyun exhales and says, “Should we just take a cab home?”

Music to Kihyun’s ears. He’s much more affectionate, naturally so, on the long ride back, even though his shirt is sticking to his back and being out in the sun for that long, sunscreen or no, is bad for his complexion. When they’re back at the apartment, they take individual showers — simultaneously, in different bathrooms, _God_, that is the height of fucking luxury — and then sprawl out on the couch together, Kihyun’s head pillowed on Changkyun’s stomach and his legs stretched lengthwise. He likes that he can hear Changkyun’s voice reverberating through his body as he speaks, and Changkyun’s hand is ever-soft in his hair. Kihyun wants to bite his fingers, leave marks on him, for putting him through such an ordeal today, but, well. It was his idea. He can’t even blame him all that much, for once.

They end up watching a romantic comedy. Something with Jennifer Garner. “She’s like Julia Roberts but prettier,” Kihyun says when Changkyun asks his opinion of her.

Changkyun makes an offended noise. “Julia Roberts _is _pretty,” he defends.

Kihyun raises his eyebrows, pokes Changkyun’s cheek. “Does someone have a crush? On Julia Roberts, seriously? She looks like a duck.”

“A cute duck,” Changkyun mumbles, reddening, and Kihyun very belatedly remembers that he’s not supposed to tease him, that he’s only supposed to be sweet and nice, and suggests that they watch something with her next, maybe he’ll see what Changkyun means.

They end up going with _Notting Hill_, which Kihyun has seen and hated a couple of times already. But they can agree on Hugh Grant’s appeal, at least. Microwave popcorn is a tradition with them by now, and Kihyun curls up small against Changkyun’s side, his feet tucked under himself and his whole body tucked under a throw blanket that — Kihyun looked up the brand when Changkyun was otherwise occupied — cost more than Kihyun’s entire moving process had. 

“I always had the hots for Rhys Ifans in this movie, actually,” Changkyun admits and Kihyun has to count slowly to five to keep from saying anything mean. 

“Really?” he says instead. “Somehow I never noticed him.”

Changkyun shrugs softly, careful not to dislodge Kihyun from his shoulder. “He’s just… I don’t know, I told you I’ve never really been with anyone like you, right? I guess he’s just what my type used to be. I dated a lot of, uh, Beatniks and hippies.”

“Connie didn’t seem like a Beatnik or a hippie,” Kihyun says absently.

There is a brief pause. “Connie?” Changkyun repeats, then, “Oh, Connie. Wh— we didn’t date, though?”

Oh, fuck. Kihyun’s clearly so tired from their long day of fun in the sun that his brain-mouth filter has disintegrated. There’s no way he can really come back from this, and he just lifts his head slightly to blink up at Changkyun. “I thought you— hm. Okay, never mind, I guess.”

“I honestly completely forgot that you met her,” Changkyun says. He looks startled, confused, lost. “Did you think we dated?”

Kihyun sighs, shifts to sit up a little so he can see him better. “Well, not as such, just— she was touching your arm a lot, so I thought that maybe—”

“I wouldn’t bring you to meet an ex on the third date,” Changkyun says, and now his confusion is starting to look a little wounded. “She, I think she had a thing for me when we first met, but we’ve never been anything but friends.”

A first fight is a milestone that Kihyun had tentatively considered. Every relationship has its ups and its downs, right? Even one that’s quite literally too good to be true. It would be so easy to get into it — to say that Changkyun is accusing him of being jealous, paranoid, even to imply that Changkyun is lying about never having been involved with Connie. But even by remembering who she is, by remembering the detail about how she kept touching Changkyun and laughing along with his small talk, Kihyun has shown too much of his hand already, and it’s too fucking late to take it back. He’s too tired to fight, anyway. He’ll come up with something else for them to bicker about another time. 

“I guess I can’t blame her for that,” he murmurs, bringing a hand up to lightly stroke Changkyun’s cheek. “Look at you.”

Changkyun is so fucking easy for him. He goes pink, all his confusion completely forgotten, and leans into the touch like a touch-starved cat. “Sorry,” he says, like an absolute idiot, and Kihyun goes in for a small kiss, smiling against his lips. Changkyun apologizing for no reason whatsoever; that’s delicious. He’ll hold onto that, make sure Changkyun makes a habit of it, several months down the line.

“So would you love me more if I ate mayo instead of yogurt?” he jokes lightly, and Changkyun laughs into him, pulling Kihyun closer.

“I think if I loved you any more, my heart would just give out,” he says, which is obviously very much the hope. Kihyun kisses him again, his fingers winding through his hair, and only stops when Changkyun protests very faintly that they’re missing the movie.

By the time Julia Roberts and her ducklike face are tearfully saying _I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her_, Kihyun has made himself misty-eyed, too, and he sniffles very, very quietly. Changkyun notices immediately, looks at Kihyun with endless wonder, draws him into his arms and kisses the side of his head. “Are you okay?”

Kihyun nods, rubbing his eye. “I just really love this movie,” he lies. “Rom-coms always make me sad.”

“Sad?” Changkyun says, kissing Kihyun’s cheek, his hands petting over Kihyun’s side in a feeble attempt to soothe him. “You should have said— we didn’t have to watch this, I’m—”

“It’s okay, it’s okay, sad in a good way,” Kihyun explains, smiling slightly, wistful. “Just, like. I don’t know. It hits a little close to home, always. I mean, I know I might not look or seem like the sort of person to want a storybook life, marriage, a little house with a white picket fence, but… I really am. My friends always make fun of me for being an old maid, and I guess, I guess they’re right. I’m not getting any younger, and I guess watching all these stories about Prince Charming and the perfect happy ending makes me want what I’ve never had.”

Onscreen, Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts are breaking up. And Changkyun’s eyes are devastated and wide, his lips parted slightly from surprise. “What you haven’t had _yet_,” he says.

Kihyun blinks. “What?”

“I want that, too,” Changkyun says. What is he doing? What is this? “I always have. If that’s what you want— I want to be that for you, Kihyun. Will you let me?”

Kihyun legitimately has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. This isn’t supposed to happen yet, it’s too early, he hasn’t planned for this. “Changkyun—”

“We can get married,” Changkyun says, talking faster now, like he’s rushing through it before he loses courage. Kihyun’s heart leaps into his throat and he tries in vain to breathe. “Then you won’t have to worry about that anymore. We can have a house with a white picket fence. Do you want to? Will you—”

“Changkyun,” Kihyun interrupts again, his cheeks bright red, the movie long-forgotten. Wonho’s now-husband had proposed to him after a mere two months of courtship, and yet Kihyun still feels like he’s won. He’s champing at the bit; he can see the endposts, the trophy, the prize. But— and this is the worst part yet, this is the _worst_— he has to say no. It’s too soon. If he says yes, he’ll really seem like a golddigger, every person Changkyun has ever met will tell him so. He has to say no. His mind races — how can he do it without hurting Changkyun’s feelings? They’re still just staring at each other, and Kihyun takes Changkyun’s face between his hands, looking so deep into his eyes as Changkyun looks so deep into his.

And, miracle of miracles, Changkyun looks away first, going pink and stammery. “I’m— I’m so sorry,” he says, babbles, “I don’t know what I’m talking about, we’ve only been together five months, you probably don’t even— that’s a lot of commitment, I shouldn’t pressure you, _God_, you’re not a prisoner here, please just pretend I never said anything, okay? Not that I don’t, don’t want to get married, I just—”

“Baby,” Kihyun soothes and leans in to kiss him, silencing him. “Sweet boy, shhh. You know how serious I am about you, right?”

After a brief, miserable pause, Changkyun nods hesitantly, and Kihyun kisses him again, then slips into his lap, a place that Changkyun is quickly realizing is Kihyun’s favorite place to be. “But still, I’m sorry for just putting you on the spot like that,” Changkyun whispers, and Kihyun shakes his head, kisses him again and again and another time, for good measure.

“Stop apologizing, it’s okay,” Kihyun reassures him. Changkyun goes silent immediately, just looking up at him with his guilty kicked-puppy eyes. “You’re so sweet. You have such a big heart. But don’t ask me to marry you just because you feel bad that I’ve never been in a relationship like this before. Okay? If you’re going to ask me, ask me because you want to get married.”

Changkyun loves him so, so much. It really worked. Kihyun really did it. Under Kihyun’s warm touches and warmer words, Changkyun’s apologetic frenzy is fading, and he nods reluctantly, then again, more self-assured. “You’re right,” he says. “Sorry, I— I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” Kihyun comforts. “You just love me.”

“I do love you,” Changkyun says, and Kihyun kisses him deeply, arms winding around his shoulders, as the end credits of the movie begin to play. 

“And,” Kihyun breathes after several minutes, “you were right, Julia Roberts _is _cute.”

“See!” Changkyun says, and then everything is back to normal, Changkyun’s dimples deep in his cheeks and his eyes bright and his arms wrapped loosely around Kihyun’s waist, and Kihyun’s blood still pumped full of adrenaline, his mouth wet with hunger for the future, for when Changkyun tries again and Kihyun says yes and then everything, all of this, all of this is Kihyun’s without this pesky insect of a man getting in the way. 

Things are back to normal, but Changkyun is still just a little shy by the time they’re getting into bed for the night. “I love you,” he whispers into Kihyun’s shoulder, like a secret, and Kihyun turns over to kiss him one more time although they’ve already had about a thousand goodnight kisses. 

“Are you okay?” Kihyun murmurs, letting their legs slot together, pulling him in as close as he can, his touches protective and caring, everything Changkyun loves about him. “Long day, huh?”

“It wasn’t,” Changkyun says, so low and soft. “Time flies when I’m with you.”

Kihyun smiles, rubs his nose in Changkyun’s cheek. Does he get all these lines from a website or something? He sounds like he practices them. “And what beautiful wings it has,” he says, matching his tone. 

Changkyun loves that, mollified and comfortable and drowsy again, and Kihyun tells him that he loves him, too, that he had such a fun day, and then it’s not long before Changkyun can’t keep his eyes open any longer and is fast asleep, snuffling into Kihyun’s hair and holding him with an unrelenting grip that keeps Kihyun from moving away to the cool comfort of the other side of the bed. Great. Kihyun stares at the angular chandelier, unable to fall asleep even though he’s exhausted, thinks about all the stupid events of this stupid day, makes a mental note to go get those photos developed, looks down at Changkyun’s sleeping form and wonders what he’s dreaming about. His lips are moving. Kihyun shoves at him with his shoulder until Changkyun’s hold loosens, then rolls a couple of feet away and falls asleep.

_MONTHS 6 & 7_

No particular milestones. Cohabitation is a test of Kihyun’s saintly patience. Changkyun barely cleans up after himself — he does have a housekeeper, Kihyun has learned, she comes every Thursday afternoon — and never cooks, only gets delivery or goes out. His pantry is horrifyingly devoid even of snacks. Kihyun offers to go grocery shopping one day and Changkyun _hands him his card_, tells him the PIN, Kihyun is literally quivering the whole walk to the nearest Dean & DeLuca. But he has to come back, he can’t very well just run off with the damn thing, although it feels so right in his wallet, in his fingers, heavy, laser-engraved with Changkyun’s name. Soon Kihyun will have one of his own. He smiles at it like a man besotted when he’s checking out his $287.50-worth of fruits and vegetables and artisanal crackers and aged chorizo and imported jams and balsamic vinegars and spice rubs and fair-trade coffee beans and fresh wagyu ribeye steaks. Then he cooks for two hours while Changkyun leans against the kitchen counter and bothers him, hand-feeds him olives, promises to buy Kihyun a “kiss the cook” apron to celebrate the one-month anniversary of their living together. 

Kihyun does learn a few more things about him, though, the most surprising being that Changkyun isn’t all saccharine all the time. Changkyun hates Halloween — the very last thing Kihyun would ever have expected him to say — and has never celebrated it, has no interest in it, and the “No” he gives when Kihyun asks if he’s ever wanted kids is so emphatic and immediate that it makes Kihyun burst out into genuine laughter. Kihyun still hates agreeing with him about anything, but he does recognize this for the boon that it is; now he won’t have to go through the tedious process of searching for some poor innocent youngster to attempt to adopt or a surrogate to subsequently abandon once Changkyun has been forced to kick the bucket. Other holidays Changkyun doesn’t particularly care for: St. Patrick’s Day, Thanksgiving (again, Kihyun hates to agree, but he can’t help it), Easter, Independence Day. But he loves Christmas and doesn’t have any strong feelings about his own birthday. They conclude the conversation by watching _Die Hard_, and Kihyun makes a mental note to start shopping around for something small and meaningful to gift him this December. Something that costs less than $20 but will make this absolute simpleton get all teary. Shouldn’t be too hard; the other day Kihyun came home with the latest issue of The New Yorker, pilfered from work, for them to read, and Changkyun had been tongue-tied for thirty minutes.

He also visits Changkyun at the office, finally, when Changkyun ends up being pulled out of his vegetative domestic state by an obligatory token appearance at a shareholders’ meeting. The lazy motherfucker had been complaining about it for days before it had happened, and then the morning of he was so stressed about having to put on a brave face and talk shop in front of all his fellow bigwigs, and Kihyun had kissed him soundly and offered to come at lunch for moral support. Changkyun’s reaction had been disproportionately joyful, and so at one o’clock Kihyun shows up to the Bank of America Tower, takes the elevator up a spectacular 33 floors until he reaches KB Pharmaceuticals, asks politely at the first of two reference desks how to get to Changkyun, is finally directed to his secretary, a bespectacled and neutral woman with salt and pepper hair, who is (apparently) a distinct entity from Changkyun’s assistant, whom Kihyun also meets; she’s on her way out of Changkyun’s office and holds the door for him. And gives him a bit of a funny look, evidently remembering “the shoe guy” from way back when. Kihyun just smiles at her, imagining her head on a stake if she ever tries to make a move on Changkyun, who is gullible and easily swayed by a clear pair of eyes, and goes in to meet him. It _is _a corner office, of course, and Changkyun moans so tragically when Kihyun comes in that it’s like they’ve been apart for years and Changkyun has been being bodily tortured the whole time, not like they just saw each other five hours ago. He curls up in Kihyun’s lap on the bespoke leather couch he has up against one of the enormous, stunning windows, lets Kihyun undo the top two buttons of his shirt and roll up his sleeves for him so he can breathe better, so he won’t overheat, and Kihyun soothes him with kisses and murmured words of praise, as if it’s anything admirable that he managed to drag himself into the office today after months of avoidance. He’s not even _doing _anything in this meeting, Kihyun knows that for a fact. He’s just there to nod approvingly every once in a while, that’s it. But he’s feeling much better by the time Kihyun is having to make his excuses and take his leave, and Kihyun thanks his secretary on his way out. An amused, maternal look this time, which Kihyun resents. Let them look, let them know, but don’t let them fucking condescend to him. He’ll accept no one’s pity. He’s made his bed, and now all he has to do is prepare to lie in it. On his silk sheets. Down pillows, as many to himself as he wants. Changkyun tends to hog the blankets; Kihyun won’t have to worry about that soon. He goes back to his own workplace and sends Changkyun a humiliating kissy-face selfie for motivation.

And he keeps planning, of course. Removes poisoning from the list after reading a few articles about how there are practically no untraceable poisons at his disposal. Looks again, very briefly, into gun ownership laws in the state of New York. Signs up for a cheap gym membership to make sure his hands are strong enough to crush his windpipe, if needed. Intersperses all of this with sneaking episodes of _Law & Order _at work so nobody gets suspicious about his search history, should it come to that. Permits Changkyun to eat him out until Kihyun is _beyond _a mess, incoherent and delirious and hitching shaky sobs of breath into his forearm, and then permits him to bring a damp washcloth and a carton of farmer’s market strawberries and hold him until Kihyun is no longer trembling. Kihyun is a third of the way through his plan. Six months until they’re engaged, six more until they’re married, then after that, just one until Kihyun is free of the whole business.

_MONTH 8_

“A disclaimer,” Kihyun says, setting his phone back down. “Please listen carefully, okay?”

“I’m listening,” Changkyun says, eager and serious, his ears practically perked up, and Kihyun, tired of looking at his face, looks at the wall instead. 

“As you know, my birthday is this month, and I do _not _want you to get me anything.”

Changkyun visibly deflates — he’d puffed up with excitement as soon as Kihyun had started that sentence. “Oh. But—”

“Nothing,” Kihyun says, just a little more sternly. “It’s not that I hate my birthday or anything, I’ve just never accepted birthday gifts, and I don’t want you to worry over what to get me or if I’ll like it. Christmas gifts only. Okay?”

Jesus, Changkyun looks like a drowned cat. “Not even, like,” he starts to say, and Kihyun cuts him off, shakes his head, crosses the few inches between them on the couch so he can take Changkyun’s face in his hands.

“Not even,” he says. Softer, so he doesn’t miff him. “It’s nothing personal, baby. I promise I just don’t want anything for my birthday. I never have. Will you please respect my wishes on this one?”

Changkyun is so pouty, but he can never resist Kihyun for long, and he sighs and nods, turning his head to press a small kiss to Kihyun’s inner wrist. “Okay.” He hesitates, then whines, “…Not even a _card?”_

“A card is fine,” Kihyun says, then laughs and squeezes his cheeks just a little. “But no funny business. You can’t get me, like, a Range Rover and just sign the door in washable marker and say it’s a card so it’s not breaking the rules.”

“How’d you guess my plan?” Changkyun grins, appeased, and Kihyun has to giggle and kiss him and snuggle all around him, his toes curling in his cashmere socks and his arms draped over Changkyun’s shoulders.

“Hey!” Kihyun says in a few minutes, coming up for air. “You distracted me from telling you what I was going to tell you. That was just the disclaimer.”

“Okay, tell me,” Changkyun says. “I’ll be good, promise.” His hand starts to creep purposefully up Kihyun’s thigh. Kihyun snickers and pushes it away, then lets him put it back five seconds later regardless. 

But he does need to tell him this, so he takes in a breath and continues, “I don’t want any presents. But ever since I moved to the city, it’s been kind of a tradition for my friends to come visit on the night of. We tend to get dinner, maybe drinks afterwards depending on if it’s a weekday or not, a pretty low-key affair. And it’d really mean a lot to me if, well.” He goes perfectly pink, bites his lip just a little, looks at him warmly through his eyelashes. “If you came with me.”

“To meet your friends?” Changkyun says. His eyes get so big and so bright so quickly. “Kihyun, I’d _love _to.”

“Oh, okay,” Kihyun says, relieved as though there had been a snowball’s chance in hell that Changkyun wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to worm his way further into Kihyun’s life, and smiles at him. “I’ll let them know I’ll be bringing a very special plus-one.”

Changkyun knows that Kihyun’s friends know about him, but that doesn’t make him any less excited about this; he’s almost wriggly with delight, beaming his deep, dimply smile at Kihyun. “Where do you usually go, should I make reservations?”

“We’re deciding right now, that’s why I brought it up,” Kihyun shrugs. “I can put you in the groupchat. And it’s on a Friday this year, so I think Minhyuk, at least, was considering staying for the weekend, maybe getting a hotel, so he needs to book that—”

“He can crash here,” Changkyun offers immediately. “God knows we have the room to spare, right?”

He squeezes Kihyun in by the waist in so he can kiss him on the cheek, smiling, and Kihyun smiles, too, Changkyun’s blatant, extravagant display of selfless generosity having the same dizzying effect on him as it usually does. “Maybe, but he’s a horrible houseguest,” Kihyun warns. “You’re so sweet for offering, though, I’ll see what he thinks of that idea.”

“Who all is coming?” Changkyun asks, so curious. “Minhyuk, um, Hyungwon? Will Wonho bring his husband?”

He’s showing off how doting he is, how he’s remembered the fine minutiae that Kihyun has deigned to share with him. Kihyun, acting impressed by this as though he hasn’t had every single aspect of Changkyun’s pathetic life memorized for the past seven months, coos adoringly and kisses his upper lip. “He usually doesn’t. But Minhyuk and Hyungwon will be there, yeah. I can ask Wonho to bring him, if you’d rather not be the only, ah, companion there?”

Changkyun starts shaking his head right away. “It’s totally up to you. It’s _your _birthday, right? It should be however you want it. And if he doesn’t usually come, then don’t disrupt the routine, just do whatever you want to do and I’ll just be so happy to be there.”

“They’ll love you,” Kihyun declares, kisses him, tries not to face the existential horror of aging another year. Changkyun will never make it to 28, but Kihyun’s about to. Silver linings all around.

Kihyun adds Changkyun to the groupchat, after warning everyone to be on their best behavior. Seeing Changkyun interacting with his friends even digitally is so surreal; he’s exceedingly polite, verging on meek, just says _That sounds great! _and _Looking forward to it! _and not much else, but the crossover between the past and the present — and, ostensibly, the future — is enough to put Kihyun in some sort of funk for the rest of the day. He drives a junior manager to tears at his mid-afternoon meeting and says _Do whatever, I don’t have a preference. _in the groupchat and leaves it at that. 

There are many downsides to living with Changkyun. Kihyun can’t begin to list them all. It’s a miracle if he remembers to rinse the sink after shaving; wherever he gets undressed, that’s where his clothes remain, although Kihyun knows for a fact he has at least two laundry hampers, to say nothing of his in-unit washer and dryer; his voice is so deep in the mornings, sometimes barely intelligible, just a low bass rumbling through his chest; he likes to drink orange juice out of mugs and coffee out of glasses; his electricity bills must be astronomical, he _never _turns the lights off when he leaves a room. Little unforgivables like that. But by far the worst part is that he’s inescapable, he’s always there, and Kihyun’s bad days are so compounded by the fact that he has to come back to _him_, that he has to simper and pander and dote and flirt, be silly and friendly and inquisitive and ask him about his day, tolerate his slobbery kisses and how he hums to himself when he’s just putzing around, trying to find a book to get halfway through and forget all about, then abandon on a coffee table, never to be resumed. Most days Kihyun dreads leaving work and returning to the apartment, and today is as bad as it ever gets, his hackles are raised from the second he turns the key in the elevator and presses the button for the fifth floor. It’ll be a miracle if he manages to avoid snapping at Changkyun — he’ll claim headache, take a shower, retreat to bed. No damage done. He pulls off his shoes as soon as he’s in, slips off his coat to hang it by the door, and calls, “It’s me.”

“I got dinner!” Changkyun says from the kitchen. 

Kihyun didn’t think it was possible to be sick of expensive delivery and five-course dine-in meals at upscale, experimental gastropubs. And yet he is. He’d kill Changkyun in a heartbeat for some Kraft mac and cheese. “Oh, thanks,” he sighs, coming in, flashing Changkyun a small, tired smile. “I’m actually—”

“I missed you today,” Changkyun says, catching Kihyun by the waist before he can slip away, draws him in for a kiss. Kihyun, prickly, doesn’t yield immediately, but Changkyun gets him in the end, suckling at his lower lip and backing him up to rest against one of the kitchen counters. Kihyun has gotten very good at gauging his mood and his intentions from the way he kisses; this one is a hello kiss, a kiss that says he’s been thinking about Kihyun’s mouth for hours and just wants to check if his tongue is still as soft as ever, he’s not trying to turn him on or get him flustered, all he wants is to be close, to make up for the hours they were apart. Kihyun brings his hands up to hold onto him, one light on his forearm, the other running fingers through his unkempt black hair, and smiles after a minute or so, tilting his head to just nudge their noses together and let them both breathe.

“I missed you, too,” he murmurs. “Sorry, it was… a long day.”

Changkyun kisses him again, making a soft, soothing noise. “Go lie down,” he suggests. “I’ll bring you things.”

“You don’t need to bring me anything,” Kihyun says, jaw tightened just slightly, but manages to smile for him, also manages to break away from his loose hold and head for their bedroom. Changkyun has the worst possible style of care, the least compatible with Kihyun, when he perceives that Kihyun is a little upset or tired or grouchy — a rare occurrence, Kihyun is very, very careful — he tends to _hover_, to follow him around and nag and cajole until Kihyun is far more annoyed with him than he is about the events of the day, Changkyun none the wiser, of course, but still the benefactor of this shift, as Changkyun-annoyance is easier to handle than life-annoyance. Kihyun expresses it as warmth, anyway, overcompensates by being so much sweeter to him, lets Changkyun bundle him up in his arms and kiss his overworked temples and offer to distract him with a late-night outing, a good piece of chocolate, a light-hearted movie, a blowjob. Usually that last one, really. Kihyun sighs, undoes his shirt buttons, somehow ends up in the shower, and when he’s coming out, Changkyun is there, he’s _always _fucking there, Kihyun is so fucking sick of him constantly being there, and he dries Kihyun off with a lovely, plush towel, then navigates him into bed. 

Kihyun hates being babied, and yet Changkyun insists on babying him, so Kihyun loves to be babied, smiles gratefully at him, invites Changkyun to join him. Living with him is always horrible, it’s been horrible since the first box was brought upstairs by the movers, Kihyun doesn’t know why it’s been so aggravated today— maybe just because of his birthday coming up, because of the awareness that this is going to get a lot harder before it can all get easy. It’s almost like— it’s almost like he’s nervous about maintaining everything, all the moving parts of his persona for Changkyun coexisting with the version of him that his friends know, but what’s the worst that could happen? Hyungwon making a disgusted face upon seeing Kihyun kissing Changkyun on the cheek? Kihyun can handle that. 

“Are you stressed about your birthday?” Changkyun asks once he’s in bed with Kihyun. Kihyun had confessed to having a headache, and Changkyun’s been being mostly quiet, just brushing his fingers back and forth over Kihyun’s shoulder as Kihyun lies against his side. 

Kihyun sighs, lifting his head from the pillow. “Something like that,” he says. “It’s just… hard to coordinate with everyone. I wish we could just commit to a place, that’d be easier, but they’re all so _particular_, and—”

“It’s your party,” Changkyun points out. “We should go wherever _you _want to go. I, um.” He goes just a little bit pink, then picks his phone up. “I asked my assistant to draw up a list of cool places, and I went through it to see if there were any I thought you’d like?”

“Oh, God, what?” Kihyun says, surprised but not disinterested, sits up too and scoots in closer to Changkyun. “Well?”

“Here, here’s my top choice, but I have a few more,” Changkyun says, clicking on the first link, and Kihyun rests his head on Changkyun’s arm to see. This is likely going to be very bad — Kihyun has no idea what Changkyun thinks his tastes are like, his _actual _preferences, but he’s bracing himself for rooftop bars that are more greenhouse than restaurant and cluttered Brooklyn eateries decorated with half-functional pinball machines and life-size prints of Jackson Pollock’s nudes. 

And so it comes as an incredible surprise when the first link, Changkyun’s very first pick, is actually— extremely to Kihyun’s liking. He blinks, leans in to see it better, moves his hand to tap on the arrow to advance the photo gallery so he can see more. “Huh,” he says.

“You like it? It used to be an opera house, but now it’s this really cool Chinese place,” Changkyun says. “Do you like dim sum?”

“I do,” Kihyun says. He looks up at Changkyun, somewhat at a loss for words, and it’s not pretense, for once. “Yeah, this— this place seems good.”

“I’ll make the reservations first thing tomorrow,” Changkyun promises and brushes a loose, damp strand of Kihyun’s hair back so he can kiss his eyebrow. “I’m so happy you like it!”

“Thank you for finding it,” Kihyun says, and it’s _stupid _how much of a weight that is off his shoulders, it doesn’t fucking matter at all, he’d have been fine to just go to the first gay bar they stumbled across in the Village, but Changkyun— well, Changkyun’s _assistant_, Kihyun doesn’t want to give the idiot more credit than he’s due— took initiative, found something everyone would like, and now he’ll make reservations, too. Kihyun doesn’t even have to dirty his hands with reading Yelp reviews. He kisses Changkyun again, his cheek, his jaw, the edge of his mouth, and, impulsive, nuzzles into him and murmurs, “Next, we should find Minhyuk a hotel.”

“Oh?” Changkyun says, his voice lowered to that tone, the one Kihyun tolerates. “How come?”

Kihyun hates living with him, but sometimes it has its perks. “Because,” he says, taking his rightful place in Changkyun’s lap, “won’t you want me all to yourself, at the end of the night?”

Changkyun, bright-eyed and warm-cheeked from the pleasure of having done something so right, grins up at him, his hands skating up Kihyun’s sides. Kihyun leans in to kiss him fully, pushes at the bolt of his jaw with his thumbs to make him open wider, kiss into him deeper, and Changkyun, living sex toy that he is, reacts just how Kihyun wants him to, pulls Kihyun closer in his lap, makes a low, encouraging noise, and Kihyun— could let him take this further, could let Changkyun flip him over and spread him open and push inside, moan so deep against the back of his shoulder while Kihyun pulls uselessly at the sheets, but. He doesn’t want that, it gives Changkyun too much power, he still doesn’t like the way he just crumbles when Changkyun puts his hand on the small of Kihyun’s back just so, and he just reaches for his dick, no point in disguising what he’s going for here, and Changkyun makes a flustered noise and pushes his hips up and lets Kihyun handle the rest.

Fast, simple, easy. If only the rest of Kihyun’s plan could be described with those same three words. After they’re done, after they’ve wiped off and are nestled back together again, Changkyun’s fingers pause their slow journey of tracing nonsense shapes on Kihyun’s abdomen and he says, low enough that Kihyun can hardly hear at first, “Have you ever fucked bare?”

Oh, Christ. This is the last thing Kihyun needs. Never mind the cleanup, never mind the inherent strangeness of swapping fluids to this extent. As far as weird sex things for millionaires to be into go, this is fairly tame, but it’s still an unwelcome surprise. “Just once, a long time ago,” he replies honestly. “Have you?”

The answer would theoretically be obvious, given that Changkyun was the one who asked, given the timbre of his voice when he’d asked it, but Kihyun, after everything, still can’t wrap his mind around the fact that other people, _multiple _people, even some _women_, would have willingly had sex with him without any kind of surety of being written into the will immediately afterwards. And yet, expected unexpected, Changkyun nods, looks up shiftily at Kihyun for just a moment. “I love it.”

“Really?” Kihyun says, a smile playing across his lips, and nudges their knees together. “I’ll go get tested this week, then.”

“You’d want to?” Changkyun clarifies, blushing. “It’s totally fine if that’s not something you’re interested in, I just— well, we’ve been together a while, and I love doing that, it’s so… intimate.”

“I’d want to,” Kihyun nods, smiles at him a little broader, there have been quite a few points of no return in this little danse macabre but this one is particularly notable, particularly egregious. Kihyun’s morals bend more and more each day. Not that he had any to begin with. “Will you think I’m lame if I told you that after that first and only time, I just wanted to save it for someone special?”

The stupid marionette loves this and does not think it’s lame, just dimples up at Kihyun and keeps going red. “No, that makes perfect sense,” he says, then bites his lower lip. “And am— am I that someone?”

Flirt. Trying to fish for compliments, for commitment. Kihyun smiles his private, knowing smile just for Changkyun, leans in to kiss him. “You are,” he breathes, and if Changkyun were any happier, he’d probably start floating. Kihyun has him tethered, though, and they just kiss again and again, end up talking about other things, and Kihyun texts the groupchat the name and address of the restaurant Changkyun had found before they go to sleep.

He skips out on lunch with Changkyun the next day to go to Planned Parenthood — go figure. Of course the first Changkyun-free non-work second he’s had in weeks is devoted to pissing in a cup, then getting his fingertip pricked until blood bubbles to the surface while a peppy, sex-positive nurse chatters happily and jots down Kihyun’s answers to their questions about his medical history. He knows he’ll be clean, up until Changkyun he’d use a condom for a blowjob, even, but at least this way he’ll have some degree of certainty that if, say, ten to thirty years from now he dies of syphilis, it was Changkyun’s fault and not his own. This version of the blood test is some new-fangled technology, it only takes 20 minutes to analyze, so Kihyun sits there and reads a magazine, legs idly crossed at the ankles, until the nurse cheerfully informs him that he’s HIV-negative. Shocker. Kihyun gathers his things and returns to the office after confirming that he’ll be able to check the rest of his results online within five days. He texts Changkyun about this, and Changkyun replies that he’s getting tested today, too, and that they match, aww. How very progressive. Changkyun sends Kihyun $80 via a direct deposit app and tells him to pick up whatever he wants for dinner on his way home from work, and Kihyun has to have a glass of cool water before he can catch his breath again.

Five days later, when Kihyun checks the Planned Parenthood online portal to confirm that he is, in fact, completely free of any sexually transmitted infections, he spends an embarrassing amount of time — forty-five minutes of his life that he’ll never get back — making a little announcement using the same poster-making software the creative team uses for their ad campaigns; it’s in autumnal colors and has a few birds and bees around the edges, and the bubbly text in the middle says ‘I’ve never been happier to see I failed every test!’ Other potential contenders included: ‘You see, when two men love each other very much…’ and ‘A bill of health so clean it’ll never pass Congress!’ Only when he’s printing it out and trimming off the white edges around the design does he really _look _at what he’s doing and sigh. It is clearly no longer a question of _if_ he’s gone insane — all he can do now is try to manage his symptoms going forward.

He leaves the print-out on the fridge the next morning for Changkyun to find later, whenever that layabout decides to make his royal way out of bed. Changkyun calls him excitedly around mid-day, asking if this means what he thinks it means, and Kihyun keeps his voice down but whispers that yes, it does, and if Changkyun knows about himself yet, and Changkyun says he’s finding out later today but the last time he got tested before he and Kihyun met he was clean and Kihyun knows he’d been in a dry spell — does Kihyun _ever_ know that — so he’s feeling optimistic. He also heaps praises on Kihyun’s graphic design skills, but Kihyun deserves the flattery and therefore doesn’t mind. And Kihyun’s self-respect has been beaten down so forcibly over the past few months that he _does _allow himself to sit through a few minutes of “you hang up first,” “no, _you_ hang up first,” before Kihyun’s boss walks by his cubicle and Kihyun peeps out a frazzled laugh and ends the call himself, then immediately straightens back up, clears his throat, and looks very busy. 

It’ll be up to him to initiate barebacking, he knows that. Changkyun has all these _ideas_ about how they respect each other. He was the one who suggested it, but Kihyun has to meet him halfway, so he’s not going to push, and Kihyun wants to postpone it as long as he possibly can; intimacy or no, the cleanup’s a bitch, and a significant part of him wants to see how long he can make Changkyun wait, what Changkyun is willing to put up with before they even have any sort of formal agreement binding them together. His birthday’s in another two weeks, he’ll save it for then, probably.

If Changkyun doesn’t smother him to an untimely death of his own via concern and attention, first. He’s obviously under the impression that Kihyun is anxious about aging, which isn’t wrong as such, but it’s certainly misguided, as are all of the infrequent thoughts that drift through Changkyun’s vapid head. He takes Kihyun out for all these little lunch dates to whimsical, artisanal patisseries, buys him ice cream, suggests Kihyun wear the bright salmon shirt instead of the pastel to work, makes the dinner reservations, finally, more than a week since initially promising to do so. Turns out that he’s as unreliable as he looks, his assistant had had to ask him about it for him to remember, Kihyun is neither disappointed nor surprised. Minhyuk will be housed at a stunning Airbnb in Tribeca, but Wonho won’t stay the weekend, and Hyungwon, as enigmatic as ever, has found some other Manhattanite friend to bother after saying his goodnights on the 22nd. (What will most likely happen is that Hyungwon, drunk and contemplative, will end up crashing with Minhyuk anyway, and Wonho won’t want to make the trek back upstate alone, so they’ll all probably get brunch on Saturday, just like they always claim to have done in college but never, in fact, did.) Changkyun is _very _nervous about meeting them, as he should be, and he overcompensates here, too, prattling for days about whether to ask Kihyun beforehand about their likes and dislikes and interests or to just figure it out once he’s there, what to wear, if it would be in bad taste to offer to pay everyone’s tab, et cetera. Kihyun tends to address all his concerns in one fell swoop by giving him a very soft look through his eyelashes, putting a very soft hand on the back of Changkyun’s head, and telling him in a very soft voice that they’ll love him, they’ll take him in as one of their own immediately, that he has nothing to worry about. This always works spectacularly well, because then Changkyun feels bad for making it about himself when clearly Kihyun is the one who’s got a valid reason to be stressed, and then all Kihyun has to do is lie back and try to relax while Changkyun tries to entertain him with whatever it is this time, a new TV show that’s supposed to be good, an excruciatingly bad poem that Changkyun wrote when he was 12, a livestream of some kittens playing at a nearby animal shelter. 

All in all, it’s business as usual. Minhyuk calls Kihyun at some point to discuss plans and also to be nosy about Changkyun, and Kihyun, irritated, assures him that he’s a very normal and friendly person, not an ice queen like Minhyuk is so fond of calling Kihyun and all his former partners, but maybe this won’t be so difficult after all — it’s only one night, thankfully, since Kihyun’s friends can’t make it into town all that often, and while Changkyun is obviously shy, Kihyun has no doubt that he’ll make an adequate participant at this fucking dinner. 

Kihyun barely has space to be nervous about it, regardless. The day of his birthday, Changkyun wakes him up with the softest, smallest smile, a badly cooked breakfast, so much extremely delicate kissing, a cute card that features a cartoon globe and a cheesy line about how Ptolemy was wrong, the universe doesn’t revolve around the Earth, it revolves around Kihyun, signed ‘your Changkyun’ in his illegible scrawl. So the morning itself is fine, as tooth-achingly sweet as Kihyun had expected, but as soon as he gets back from the office to change into something more dinner-appropriate, Changkyun is clearly in a bad way: he’s half-dressed and wild-eyed, anxious, and brandishes two identical shirts at Kihyun to try and get him to help choose.

“Baby,” Kihyun laughs, pulling Changkyun out of the walk-in closet and hugging onto his unyielding waist. “They’re just my friends, you don’t have to dress up.”

“But which one should I wear,” Changkyun mumbles, but relents in another moment, dropping the shirts — Kihyun holds back a wince, he can guess how much those cost — and pressing his face into Kihyun’s hair. “Hi. What are _you _going to wear?”

“Nothing special,” Kihyun shrugs, tilts Changkyun’s head to him so they can kiss, so he can smooth his hands up Changkyun’s back and comfort him. “Do you really want my help picking something out?”

Changkyun nods miserably, and Kihyun smiles again, pulls away from him to go into the closet and see what he has to work with. They have a little bit of time; they’re not meeting the others until 6:30, and the restaurant is a fifteen-minute walk or drive away, so he might even make Changkyun play dress-up. Maybe shape him into the man Kihyun expected him to be, for once. He takes a pair of black slim-line trousers down from its hanger and passes them back to Changkyun, then tracks down the matching blazer and hands it to him as well.

“Wear your glasses,” he suggests with a soft smile. “They’ll be nicer to you.”

“They were going to be mean to me otherwise?” Changkyun huffs, panicked, and Kihyun, delighted beyond words by Changkyun being such a hapless, vulnerable half-wit scared out of his feeble mind by the prospect of meeting Kihyun’s very innocuous friends, puts his arms around his shoulders and kisses his pouty lips until they’re no longer as pouty. 

“Try it with a white t-shirt, then a black one, and… those shoes,” he says, pointing out a pair Changkyun had already taken out, expensive leather with a tapered toe. They’re Prada, Kihyun is pretty sure. Dressy oxfords. “And I’ll pick accessories for you, okay?”

“Thank you,” Changkyun breathes like Kihyun has given him access to the fountain of youth, so adoring and grateful and helpless, and Kihyun kisses him once more before going through to their bathroom to sort through Changkyun’s haphazardly organized jewelry collection. 

Changkyun joins him there in a moment, obediently wearing the designated outfit with a white shirt, and starts taking out his contacts. Kihyun looks him up and down and makes a thoughtful noise. “Black shirt, I think,” he says, and sets one thin, dangly silver earring on the edge of the bathroom counter for him. He’s trying to visually emphasize that Changkyun isn’t like any of Kihyun’s exes, as prior to this, Kihyun would never have been caught dead with someone with more than one hole through his earlobes, but Kihyun’s selections will glitter adequately in the dim light of the restaurant without being ostentatious, and he’ll look serious but whimsical all at once. Kihyun provides him with a plain stud for the other ear — he knows how Changkyun likes to mismatch — and smiles at him as Changkyun slips his glasses on. 

“You sure I won’t look like a bat?” Changkyun says, blinking to get used to the glasses, and starts to swap his earrings out for Kihyun’s choices. He really just obeys Kihyun without question — it’s not the _best _gift Changkyun could ever give him, but it’s pretty damn great. He cranes his head to either side to see how the earrings look, then nods contentedly, calmed.

“You’ll look so handsome,” Kihyun says, rubbing his side encouragingly. Changkyun smiles at him in return and heads out of the bathroom again, and Kihyun follows him but goes further, heading for the closet, where he takes down the outfit he’d mostly planned and changes into it, neatly and pointedly placing the clothes he’d worn to work into the hamper. Changkyun, of course, doesn’t notice this, too busy fussing over whether to tuck his shirt in or not. Kihyun comes back out, dressed, and pushes Changkyun’s hands away so he can tuck it in for him, just a few inches at the front like how he keeps seeing stylish young gay men do it. 

“You think?” Changkyun asks, uncertain but not contradictory, and looks around him to see himself in the mirror, fidgeting with the tucked fabric. “Oh. Yeah, that looks good.”

Kihyun smiles, makes a noise to agree with him, glances over him critically again. He looks just as Kihyun wanted him to, a little expensive, a little bookish. The close-fitting all-black outfit gives him the illusion of age, too, so Minhyuk won’t just spend the whole time trying to pinch Changkyun’s baby cheeks. Kihyun crosses to him, pulls Changkyun in for a brief kiss that reminds him that they both need some lip balm for the night. “You look good,” he tells him softly. “And they’ll love you, because they love me and I love you, and because you’re so lovable. Trust me?”

Changkyun exhales a shaky, tense breath, but leans in to just press their foreheads together, a smile starting on his lips. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “This is supposed to be about you, your special day. I can handle it, and I trust you.”

Kihyun smiles against Changkyun’s mouth, savoring those words, and gives his ass a companionable pat. “Let’s head out,” he suggests. “Are we walking, or…?”

Changkyun looks at him. Kihyun looks back. Changkyun starts to smile, his eyes beginning to sparkle, and Kihyun mirrors him, his fingers laced behind Changkyun’s neck. “So you don’t want to walk,” Changkyun guesses, and Kihyun laughs, leaning in for another kiss. “Look, it’s your birthday, we could take a dirigible if you wanted.”

“Another Hindenburg disaster is exactly what I _don’t_ want for my birthday,” Kihyun grins. “A cab is fine.”

“You got it,” Changkyun says, kisses him, takes out his phone. “Um, you wanna let them know we’re on our way?”

It’ll take longer to be driven than it would to walk, but Kihyun doesn’t care. He nods and starts composing a message in the groupchat, and is temporarily interrupted by a soft, damp kiss on the cheek and Changkyun murmuring, “You look gorgeous, by the way.”

Kihyun smiles to himself, keeps typing. “You think so?”

“I love that shirt on you. It’s my favorite.”

Kihyun only wears it because Changkyun likes it. “Really?” he says, soft like this is coming as a surprise, and glances up at him. “Well— I’ll wear it more often, then.”

Changkyun kisses him on the cheek again, then leaves him alone to go get both of their coats. Kihyun sends the text, then joins him in the entryway and lets Changkyun hold the collar up for him while he slips his arms in. Changkyun is much, much calmer than he’d been when Kihyun got back, than he’s been at all for the past week or so, all smiles and gallantry as he calls the elevator, lets Kihyun go in first, says their Uber is 3 minutes away. The doorman wishes Kihyun a happy birthday — Changkyun must have warned him in advance or something — and Kihyun blushes and thanks him and hides under Changkyun’s arm, smiling, and when they’re in the car, they sit close, ankles intertangling and hands held tight. 

“Look,” Kihyun says, although it’s barely necessary at this point, “when I meet Jooheon, I guarantee I’ll hide under a bed or something. You’re doing great.”

Changkyun gets all dimply from Kihyun saying when, not if, and squeezes his hand. “I’m excited for this,” he admits. “I bet they’ll have a lot of interesting stories about you.”

“That’s for sure,” Kihyun says with a dry laugh. He’s ready to kick quite a lot of shins under the table. “I apologize on their behalf in advance.”

Changkyun shakes his head, smiling brighter, and says, “I’m sure they’ll be fantastic.”

How dare he try to reassure Kihyun about his own friends? Kihyun knows they’ll be fantastic, he wouldn’t have kept them around if they weren’t worth his time. He just keeps smiling, ignores the faint queasiness around his midsection he’s getting from all the stopping and starting they’re having to do in this standstill traffic, and checks his phone to see that the others are there already, waiting for them. He sighs, looks out of the window, tilts his head against Changkyun’s when Changkyun rests on his shoulder, drums his fingertips very lightly on the back of Changkyun’s hand in time with the generic pop song playing at a low volume from the car radio. 

As they get out of the car, Changkyun whispers that he loves him, and Kihyun turns back to give him a kiss, whispers it back, then smiles supportively at him and guides him by the hand into the restaurant. It’s smaller than he’d expected, not as grand as it had looked in the pictures, but he finds himself liking it anyway, content to just stand there and undo the buttons of his coat one-handedly as Changkyun asks the hostess to direct them to the private table for Yoo, party of five. Changkyun’s hold on his hand is fairly tight, but Kihyun hasn’t seen his friends for a while so he doesn’t even have time to care, just follows behind the hostess, his face flexing between smiling in anticipation and neutral-displeased so he doesn’t look too excited. As they’re getting to the table, Kihyun squeezes Changkyun’s hand one last time, which Changkyun doubtless interprets as _relax, it’ll be fine_, but which Kihyun intends as _do not screw this up for me. _

And there they are, the three of them; already bickering over the menu and scarcely noticing when Kihyun and Changkyun come to a halt in front of the table. Kihyun’s traitor heart can’t help but swell with affection for just a moment before he constricts it back down. They’re the same as they always are, just with different hair, in Minhyuk’s bleach-blond case. Hyungwon is as aloof and skeletal as ever but already nursing a neon pink drink with no fewer than three cocktail umbrellas in it, and Wonho is wearing the tightest sweater the world has ever seen — he must have needed a vacuum sealer and some industrial-strength baby powder to fit into that thing. It’s like paint. Kihyun rolls his eyes, raps his knuckles on the table, and says, “Well?”

“Sweet birthday baby!” Minhyuk shrieks, shoving Hyungwon out of the way so they can all get up and greet him in turn; Minhyuk first with a firm, bony hug, then Wonho with a warm embrace and mutual kisses on the cheek, how genteel, and finally Hyungwon with a respectful handshake. Changkyun hangs back, embarrassed but happy, until Kihyun eases him forward into the light, not wanting him to be left out. 

“So this is Changkyun, my boyfriend,” he says, smiling at him like he’s a very stupid project at an elementary school science fair that he’s proud of in a third-grader sort of way, and gently pulls him to sit down by his side, slipping into the booth. “Changkyun, this is Minhyuk, Wonho, and Hyungwon.”

“Hi,” Changkyun says, mildly flustered.

“Hiiiii,” they all chorus in response, several octaves apart, and regard him with immense interest, as if unsure if he’s corporeal or merely a well-made hologram. 

“You’re so cute,” Minhyuk says, of course he takes initiative, and Hyungwon nods sagely, sipping his absurd beverage, while Wonho beams at them approvingly. “Now there really _aren’t_ any more good guys left in the city, since you two are off the market.”

Changkyun goes bright pink, has to let go of Kihyun’s hand so he can wipe his sweaty palm off on his trousers, and Kihyun tries to signal to Minhyuk with his eyes to keep it toned down, but Minhyuk ignores him, leaning further forward to get a better look at Changkyun, who squirms.

“We didn’t think he was real, but he sure is,” Hyungwon comments to Kihyun. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kihyun says coolly. “Of course he’s real.”

“At least, as far as I know,” Changkyun says with a weak laugh, and Kihyun purses his lips to keep from smiling, presses their legs together under the table. 

“Shownu sends his love and happy birthday wishes,” Wonho adds, and Kihyun sees Changkyun’s eyes dart over to — unintentionally, but unavoidably — skim over the broad, attractive swell of Wonho’s chest in his sweater. It’s fairly warm in the restaurant, and yet Wonho’s nipples are still somehow erect. Kihyun elbows Changkyun in the ribs under the guise of passing him a menu, and Changkyun’s wandering eyes snap down to the laminated pages at an acceptable speed. Kihyun, appeased, smiles at Wonho and pats Changkyun’s knee under the table.

“How’s his semester going?” he asks. “You haven’t been getting separation anxiety again, have you?”

“Shut up, that was _one _time,” Wonho says, going a fragile rosy shade and stealing Hyungwon’s glass to take a sip. 

“It doesn’t count as one time if it lasted for three months,” Minhyuk points out innocently, then goes back to staring obnoxiously at Changkyun. “Cool earrings.”

“Kihyun picked them out,” Changkyun says, blushing, and Kihyun has to fight to keep from making an exasperated noise. Get it _together_, you pathetic approval junkie, grow a spine. He just smiles fondly at him, lifts his free hand to lightly tweak the glittering tip of the earring in question. 

“Well, go ahead, free pass until appetizers to be nosy,” he says casually, and even Hyungwon’s eyes flash with intent as they all sit up straighter, trying to decide where to begin.

“Where’d you even _find_ him?” Minhyuk says.

Kihyun appreciates him referring to Changkyun in the third person, enjoys the disrespect of it all, like Changkyun is too stupid to understand that he’s being talked about. “It’s kind of a funny story,” he says, trying to remember what even happened, what sort of perfect meet-cute he’d orchestrated for Changkyun to never forget, and by his side, Changkyun is going all mushy and quietly volunteering to explain. Kihyun nods, and Changkyun closes his menu and clears his throat, so desperate for approval, dying to be loved, and starts:

“He found me twice, actually. First in a coffee shop— I don’t even think he remembers this one, it was such a small, random thing. We just ran into each other on the way out of this— this random little place in midtown. So I bumped into him, and he was in a hurry and we didn’t even talk or anything but he was just so beautiful, and I thought that was it, like, I was just going to think about him every day for the rest of my life without any closure, but then we bumped into each other again! In Grand Central! Can you imagine that? 700,000 people pass through Grand Central every single day and we just ran into each other. I was running late for a meeting and I didn’t look where I was going and Kihyun had all this coffee and new shoes and— I’m doing a really bad job of telling this story, I swear it was really romantic,” he says, laughing self-consciously, and it’s _working_, Minhyuk is being _charmed_, Kihyun can see it happening and he’s not thrilled about it. “Like, talk about fate. You know? Two strangers crossing paths, over and over. What are the odds? And now— well.” He goes pink and dimpled, takes Kihyun’s hand again, and Kihyun has to let him, has to act like that corny, sappy narrative doesn’t make him wish neither of them had ever been born, just smiles at him in return and doesn’t even break away when Wonho and Minhyuk coo loudly.

Of course Changkyun has been thinking of it as the benevolent hand of fate finally dealing him a positive lot. Kihyun will never deny a comparison to any sort of godlike entity; he likes being inevitable. Changkyun wouldn’t have been able to escape meeting him if he’d tried. “And now here we are,” he completes. 

“You’re too good for him,” Hyungwon says seriously to Changkyun, and there’s Kihyun’s first under-table kick of the night, which Hyungwon doesn’t acknowledge whatsoever thanks to years of practice. 

“Not at all,” Changkyun says in that earnest tone of his, oh, Christ, here we fucking go. “He really is my better half.”

“_Babe,”_ Kihyun can’t help saying, dropping his face into Changkyun’s shoulder, and nobody even really knows what to _do _with that, least of all Kihyun, this was such a fucking mistake— Changkyun shouldn’t be let out into polite company or otherwise, Minhyuk looks like he’s trying not to burst out laughing and Wonho seems to be holding back tears, and Hyungwon just raises his glass and takes a long drink. 

“Young love,” Wonho says quaveringly. “I’m so happy for you, Kihyun.”

“You’ve been married for three years, not thirty, stop talking like a baby boomer,” Minhyuk points out, stepping up to be snippy now that Kihyun’s obviously been declawed, and Wonho, silenced, pouts. 

“You’re living together, right?” Hyungwon asks, and Changkyun nods, about to say more on the subject, but blessedly, a waiter comes to take everyone’s orders, and Minhyuk and Kihyun wanted the same thing and argue over who gets to get it, and when Changkyun tentatively suggests that they _both_ could, they both give him brief, disapproving looks, and he shrinks back, laughing. 

Kihyun hates this. The restaurant is perfect, his friends are here to celebrate him, Changkyun is footing the bill so Kihyun can shamelessly order the most expensive cocktail on the menu, but Wonho keeps giving him this _look_, this doe-eyed simpering look that means he sees himself and Kihyun as brothers in arms now that they’re both so in love, and it’s not that Kihyun ever looked down on Wonho for falling so hard so fast for his studly professor, he just— he never thought that would be his lot in life, and it’s a shame that it had to come to this. Not even once before have his friends ever warmed to any of Kihyun’s boyfriends so immediately; Hyungwon and Changkyun are currently swapping email addresses so Hyungwon can send him information on the migration patterns of local songbirds, since apparently Changkyun has long harbored a vague interest in ornithology, and Minhyuk has eased up on the interrogation, only interjecting every once in a while to ask about Columbia or growing up all over the world or whatever else catches his attention. In the past, it was just “what are your intentions towards our precious jewel” and “why do you always look like something just died three feet away from you,” none of the jovial teasing he’s currently putting Changkyun through. It’s not Minhyuk’s fault, or Hyungwon’s, or Wonho’s, it’s all on Changkyun for putting Kihyun in this situation, but he still hates it, grits his teeth when he takes mouthfuls of his bitter drink, wants to take Changkyun away from here, away from his well-meaning inquisitive friends and the bustling restaurant and the awareness of it being Kihyun’s birthday, he’s _never _liked his birthday but now he thinks he might just hate it, and this is going swimmingly, this is going so well, nobody suspects a damn thing, but Kihyun would rather be anywhere else, anybody else, alone.

“Here’s the thing about Kihyun,” Minhyuk says, two drinks down and chattier than usual, “he has horrible taste in men.”

“Thanks,” Changkyun laughs, warm and not offended in the slightest, and Minhyuk shakes his head, blond strands flying haphazardly over his face. 

“No, I mean— he _usually_ has horrible taste in men, which is why I’m so shocked that you’re so lovely,” he says. “Look at him, isn’t he lovely? Admit he’s lovely, Kihyun.”

“I’m not denying it,” Kihyun says with a smile for Changkyun, and Hyungwon chokes on his calamari. 

“Jesus, get a room,” Hyungwon says once he’s caught his breath, and Kihyun just arches an eyebrow at him.

“We have one,” he reminds, and titters out a laugh when Hyungwon scowls.

“I was saying,” Minhyuk insists, “that this is such a pleasant surprise. Kihyun is very difficult to love, we know that better than anyone, he was a _terror _in high school—”

“You didn’t even know me in high school,” Kihyun says blandly, not denying the rest.

Changkyun has made a small, wounded noise, and when Kihyun glances at him, he sees that he looks a little offended. Christ, if he starts trying to defend Kihyun’s honor against Minhyuk’s teasing, they’ll be here for a very, very long time. Luckily, the point becomes moot because then Wonho blinks and says, “Wait, he didn’t? I could have sworn he’s always told me he did.”

“Because he likes to lie about it,” Kihyun explains. Has to be careful with his tone, with his choice of words, doesn’t want to slip up and act the way he always does around his friends, not in front of Changkyun. “He knew _of _me.”

“Because you had a reputation for being a terror! Where’s the lie?” Minhyuk pouts. 

“We went to rival high schools,” Kihyun tells Changkyun quietly. “Minhyuk likes to make a bigger deal of it than it really was.”

“Even I heard of you,” Hyungwon says, his chin in his hand. “The scourge of the county debate tournament.”

“They’re exaggerating,” Kihyun says, but they’re not, he really was a terror, and he prides himself on those days. He’s gone soft since then, clearly. Changkyun sneaks a dumpling from his plate and he doesn’t even bat an eye. 

Changkyun puts his other hand, his right, reassuringly on Kihyun’s leg under the table. Again with trying to soothe him when Kihyun’s been dealing with these people for years, since before this plan of his was even a twinkle in his eye. How insulting. “But you met in college, right? What was he like then?”

“Even worse,” Minhyuk grins. “Although we took Wonho in like a stray at the exact same time and he mellowed all of us out pretty fast.”

“That’s one word for it,” Wonho says, miming taking a hit off a joint, and Hyungwon snorts an unattractive laugh. 

“Mainly what Kihyun did was harass his professors at office hours and take a lot of pictures,” Minhyuk continues.

“God, I forgot about that,” Hyungwon groans. “What happened to all those?”

“They’re probably still on my old computer’s hard drive,” Kihyun shrugs, and Changkyun looks at him with a not insignificant amount of surprise.

“You did photography?” he asks. “Like, for school or for fun?”

“Both,” Minhyuk answers for him. “He had a stint with our school paper before they kicked him off the team for being a dick, and then he tried to minor in visual arts but his parents weren’t down with that on top of the English major, so he just settled for taking sexy candids of Wonho on this, like, shitty digital camera he got at the electronics store in town. He thought he was our school’s, uh. Ansel Elgort.”

“Adams,” Hyungwon corrects. “Ansel Elgort is the guy from _Whiplash.”_

“No, that’s… who is that?” Wonho says, thoughtful. “Miles Teller?”

“I thought Miles Teller was a magician,” Minhyuk says and eats a Maraschino cherry from his drink.

Kihyun closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment to stave off his oncoming headache. In all honesty, he’d completely forgotten about his brief affair with the photographic arts, but this reminder couldn’t possibly come at a less convenient time. “Ansel Adams was a photographer, Ansel Elgort is the guy from _The Fault in Our Stars_, and the magician you’re thinking of is, in fact, a separate entity from the actor Miles Teller, who was, in fact, in _Whiplash.”_

“You’re soooo smart,” Minhyuk says, oblivious to the suffering he’s causing Kihyun, who can still feel Changkyun watching him with renewed wonder and adoration.

“I’d love to see your pictures,” Changkyun says softly, and Kihyun wrinkles his nose, shakes his head, takes another sip of his drink.

“They’re exaggerating again,” he says. “It really wasn’t anything special. But I can try and dig some up for you, if you really want.”

“I really want,” Changkyun murmurs, slides his hand further around Kihyun’s knee, and Kihyun exhales tensely and puts his hand over Changkyun’s, lets their fingers slot together, lets the touch ground him. This is taking too long— all of this is taking too long. He sees his friends a maximum of once every eight months, and it’s still too much. He’s disappointed that they like Changkyun so much — he’d expected at least a little resistance, but clearly they don’t see him for what he is, a maladroit, bumbling fool with too much money for his own good, the bane of Kihyun’s existence, a try-hard, a chump, so pretentious and worldly and vapid, under it all. Kihyun is sick of this. He downs the rest of his drink, asks Changkyun to get him another one, wonders if maybe he really is just upset about turning another year older. He leans against Changkyun’s arm, nods slightly when Changkyun asks in undertones if he’s okay, blames it on a long day at work when Hyungwon — of all people! — makes fun of him for being listless. 

Wonho checks his phone. “Should I go?” he says, perma-pout lodged on his rosy lips. “The last train isn’t until midnight, but it’s another hour on the bus after I get to Poughkeepsie, unless the hubby comes to meet me at the station…”

Minhyuk retches and Hyungwon dips his fingers in his glass of ice water to flick a few drops Wonho’s way. “Never call him that again,” he says coldly, and Wonho just giggles like the charming ingenue that he is, shameless, and delicately wipes the water off his cheek with the folded-over sleeve of his suctioned-on sweater. 

“You’re in New Paltz, right? That is a bit of a trek,” Changkyun agrees pensively. Of course he’s taking Wonho’s unserious cries for attention as immediate matters of concern; all Wonho wants is to be validated, and while Kihyun supposes that he and Changkyun aren’t dissimilar in that regard, it’s still pathetic to watch how easily manipulated Changkyun is by anyone other than Kihyun. “But the longer you can stand to stay, the better; it’ll be our loss if you go.” (Somehow, Kihyun can hear the semicolon.)

That was all Wonho had been waiting for, really, and he beams coquettishly at Changkyun, endeared. “You’re such a charmer,” he says. “I see why Kihyun likes you.” A kick under the table to him for that one, and Wonho’s less good at disguising it, he yelps just a little and goes sullen, flashing Kihyun a resentful look. 

Changkyun gets a bottle of champagne for the table, and they all drink to Kihyun’s health. Minhyuk makes a catty little comment about 28 being the new 20, and Kihyun digs his nails into the meat of his own palm to keep from swiping back at him with something similar, he’s been doing that all night, actually, and the reason all of this feels so wrong, he’s starting to realize, is that for the past seven months, he’s been so hyperfixated on Changkyun, on their relationship, and this is the first day in all of it that all the focus has been entirely on him. Ostensibly that is the purpose of all this — once Changkyun is six feet under, Kihyun will be the star of his own life for _once_, at _last_, no one’s second fiddle, but he wasn’t ready for it tonight, he hadn’t prepared. Is this how it feels to be Changkyun? A wallflower, a shrinking violet, a quivering shameplant that curls in on itself when directly observed, all manner of metaphorically herbaceous weaklings, planted in nutrient-poor soil and overwatered by attention. God, Kihyun needs another drink, something stronger than champagne, and he doesn’t know what’s happening to him and he doesn’t really like it.

So he does what he’s learned how to do best; he exploits Changkyun. “Hey,” he murmurs while Minhyuk is animatedly explaining his convoluted theories about the allegedly prophetic dreams he’s been having lately to an enraptured Wonho and dubious Hyungwon. Changkyun had been in the middle of a laugh, but he turns to look at Kihyun, and his smile goes from too self-aware and shy to something far more tender, something so warm, something so familiar. Kihyun smiles back at him. “You’re so handsome in profile.”

“Oh,” Changkyun says. He’s pleased, but he goes a little pink, his dimple flickering. “You think so?”

Kihyun nods and leans up to brush his lips over Changkyun’s jaw. “I don’t want to stay out too long,” he breathes. “I know we said no presents, but I have an idea for a thing or two you could give me.”

Changkyun swallows; Kihyun watches his throat working. For a moment, Kihyun almost thinks Changkyun is going to protest, say he’s having fun with Kihyun’s friends, he doesn’t want to leave soon, but of course that’s not what Changkyun says at all — he just tightens his hand on Kihyun’s thigh, inclines his head in a nod, and replies, “Just say when,” in that low voice, his lips starting to pull into a smile. 

Kihyun’s not quite ready to go yet, but it’s very nice to know he has the option. He smiles at Changkyun, eyes amused and conspiratorial, but is distracted by Minhyuk loudly and pointedly clearing his throat. “Something you want to share with the class?” Minhyuk asks, and Kihyun just grins at him.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he says, leaning against Changkyun’s side. Coming up with an excuse to slip away won’t be easy — this is _his _birthday dinner, after all — but it won’t be impossible, either, and he can make it through desserts, at least. He has another sip of his champagne, lets the bubbles fizzle on his tongue. Meanwhile Changkyun integrates himself back into the conversation seamlessly, asks for clarification on a point Wonho is making about déja vu, but his fingers find Kihyun’s under the table, and Kihyun’s resulting smile is small but smug as he presses their palms together.

Do Kihyun’s friends like Changkyun more than him? The answer is quite obviously yes, and yet Kihyun finds himself not caring all that much. Changkyun is only temporary, and Kihyun is going to have the last laugh, as well as his friends’ overwhelming sympathy and attention once he’s playing the perfect role of the grieving untimely widower. He leans his head on Changkyun’s shoulder, traces his fingertips up the fine bones of Changkyun’s wrist, and laughs at a typically cutting Hyungwon remark. 

This will be easy if Kihyun shuts off his brain and goes on autopilot, a skill he’s been perfecting since kindergarten, and it takes him another half a drink before he can get there but he _gets _there. Then he’s there and everything _is _easy — he participates in conversation, orders dessert, has more champagne. Changkyun is warm and by his side and pays for everything, before Minhyuk even has time to get his wallet out all the way, before Wonho can say, “Should we get the check?” Nobody predicted that that would happen — Kihyun had told them that Changkyun was _comfortable_, but that was it — so they all just sort of blink at him, shell-shocked, grateful, a little embarrassed, and no one is more embarrassed than Changkyun himself, the tips of his ears pink and his grip sweaty against Kihyun’s. “Don’t mention it,” he says with the kind of gravitas that makes it seem like he really means it, and Kihyun leans up to kiss him on the cheek and smiles around at the table, at his friends, at his friends who are gathered here today to celebrate him.

“Well,” Kihyun says, “should we keep going?”

They go down the street to get post-dinner drinks. Hyungwon, having the metabolism of a cicada, is well on the way to sloshed already, and he and Changkyun are in a spirited debate over Sigmund Freud as Minhyuk cackles in Kihyun’s other ear about Wonho’s sweater. Wonho has been on the phone with his husband for five minutes now, first ostensibly just to tell him he’d be staying in the city tonight — surprise, surprise — and now just to croon that he misses him, misses him so bad, and Kihyun laughs and pinches the side of Wonho’s neck until Wonho has to hang up because he’s giggling too much. It really is just like the old days, except now Changkyun is here, too, fitting in like he’s been there all along, like they were waiting for him, and Kihyun supposes in a sense, they were, or at the very least, he was. Minhyuk tries on Changkyun’s glasses and Changkyun holds onto Kihyun’s arm while he waits for Minhyuk to give them back, blinking around with his heavy eyelids and hesitant smile. Kihyun isn’t drunk — he’s approximately tipsy, just enough that everything is finally tolerable, and this is going to be so much better once Changkyun is gone again, once Kihyun is the one who can pay for his friends to do anything they want, once there’s nothing holding him back. He kisses the side of Changkyun’s mouth all sloppy, and actually asks Minhyuk to take a group picture of everyone — Hyungwon ends up doing it, as he has the longest arms. 

(“What, out of all of us?” Wonho says, glancing at Hyungwon’s arm and then critically at his own. 

“No,” Hyungwon says, solemn, “out of the whole world.”) 

Kihyun hasn’t forgotten what he’d asked Changkyun towards the latter half of dinner, and neither has Changkyun; Kihyun can tell because Changkyun, dark-eyed and red-lipped and jovial, keeps looking at Kihyun before Kihyun speaks, Kihyun keeps catching him looking, even when Changkyun is talking to someone else he’s still looking at Kihyun. His hands reach out for Kihyun in a way that seems nearly unconscious, like he doesn’t know he’s doing it at all, he’s always touching his sleeve or his shoulder or his back or his waist. Clingy. Kihyun clings back to him, reminds himself to cling, lets Changkyun kiss him full on the mouth after they drink to Kihyun once again, grins into his lips as his friends mock and cheer. Nobody ever cheered for Kihyun in undergrad when he was kissing his boyfriends of the moment. Kihyun curls his fingers in the collar of Changkyun’s coat and breathes, “Five more minutes,” then turns away and demands someone play Erasure on the jukebox.

Hyungwon is fading fast, drooping against Wonho’s shoulder like a wilting tulip, and Wonho keeps complaining about how he’s too warm, he wants to take his sweater off, his cheeks flushed bright, and Minhyuk is trying to explain the rules to a very complicated card game that, frankly, nobody has the patience for, including Minhyuk himself. Kihyun grasps Changkyun’s wrist to check his watch, then sighs and says, “If brunch is still on for tomorrow, then we’d better head out so I can get a good night’s sleep for _once.” _Everybody protests, of course, but he complains shamelessly about the daily grind of his job until, reluctantly and after many, many rounds of hugs, which Kihyun is only allowing because Changkyun thinks he’s the sort of person who enjoys being hugged, they relinquish him. Even Changkyun gets pulled into the embrace, squished in by Kihyun’s side, and Kihyun can feel his soft breath against his ear as Wonho squeezes them both in his cartoonishly sculpted arms, then pushes them out onto the street with a half-joking shout to be safe, kids.

It’s fucking cold outside, and Kihyun turns up the collar of his coat and wraps his arms around himself, grinning up at Changkyun. “Sorry about them,” he says, then rocks forward on the ball of his foot to peer down at Changkyun’s phone and check when their car is coming. Changkyun puts his arms around Kihyun and lets him leech off his body heat, but he’s acting strange, responding slow. Kihyun tilts his head to look at him as best he can, nudges him lightly. “You okay? Tired?”

“Nah, not at all. And they’re great,” Changkyun says, still with his voice caught in his throat. He’s looking at Kihyun all glassy, but he hadn’t had that much to drink, and there isn’t anything that Kihyun or any of his friends could have said to upset him, so Kihyun can’t figure out what the problem is, what— “You’re so beautiful.”

Oh. Kihyun could have guessed that. He supposes there must be some appeal in seeing him so comfortable, so relaxed, at least based on what Changkyun likes about him so far. He hums softly at the back of his throat and acts on feeling, presses their lips together, and Changkyun was _waiting_, he must have been waiting all night, because he opens up for him right away, his mouth hot like a fresh bruise and his tongue wet against Kihyun’s lower lip. Kihyun sways closer to him, grabs handfuls of his coat, and Changkyun’s hands are on his waist and he kisses Kihyun until Kihyun is clutching at him with no pretenses, he wants to be closer than this, and even when Changkyun’s phone buzzes against Kihyun’s hip to let them know that the driver has arrived, they don’t break apart. 

They’re still kissing as they climb into the back of the car, Changkyun mumbling to confirm the address, and Kihyun doesn’t bother with a seatbelt, he’s already got his hands pushing up under Changkyun’s shirt to feel his skin. As a dutiful boyfriend, he knows he’ll need to ask about what Changkyun thought of his friends, fully debrief about the night they just had, and he will do that, he will, but. Later. Now, he’s got Changkyun’s tongue down his throat and Changkyun’s big, warm palm curled around the side of his neck, soft wet sounds between them as they change angles, as they kiss. The poor driver. But Kihyun doesn’t care, Changkyun will probably end up tipping him $25 for his emotional damages, and Changkyun truly paid for _everything _tonight, everyone’s drinks, Minhyuk’s Airbnb, dinner, and Kihyun wants to tell the driver to go around the block a few times so Kihyun can give Changkyun the full _Partition _treatment, but he gets so caught up in sucking on Changkyun’s lips and letting his hand knead Changkyun’s upper thigh, closer and closer with every move, that he doesn’t even notice how short the drive ends up being, no traffic this time of night, and soon they’re spilling back out onto the street and the doorman is letting them into the darkened lobby of Changkyun’s building.

The doorman might say something like _my goodness,_ but Kihyun is mouthing a line down Changkyun’s neck as Changkyun stumbles his way over to the elevator and doesn’t hear, doesn’t care, doesn’t worry about looking this man in the eye tomorrow morning — Changkyun is moaning low against Kihyun’s hair and he’s half-hard in the trousers Kihyun picked for him to wear tonight, just from some heavy petting in the cab, and Kihyun accidentally nips at his bottom lip just a shade too hard and giggles in apology when Changkyun makes a sharp noise. Kihyun keeps kissing him even as Changkyun tries to get out his keys, then relents, laughs quiet and breathy into the collar of Changkyun’s shirt, and it’s unclear who pushes whom up against the wall of the elevator but that’s where they are when they make it to the fifth floor.

They barely slip out in time — the doors are starting to close already, they’re so caught up in each other. Kihyun’s hands rush to rid Changkyun of his blazer, to fumble the glasses off his face and set them down on the first flat surface he can find, to touch him wherever he can, the nape of his neck, the half-inch of skin above his beltline when his shirt rucks up, his forearms. “I want you,” he says into Changkyun’s mouth, and Changkyun makes such a low sound, Kihyun can feel it in his knees, somehow, gasps in response and lets Changkyun kiss him so deep, start walking him to the bedroom, which is harder than either of them thought — they can’t stop kissing, can’t stop touching each other, they shed layers as they go and Kihyun doesn’t even bother to pick up after himself. Changkyun’s hand slips between his legs and Kihyun groans, grabs for him blindly, they collide with a small end table on their way to their room and knock a lamp to the floor and once again Kihyun doesn’t look back, doesn’t even notice, Changkyun is so eager when he’s about to fuck him and Kihyun is drunker on that than anything else, on the way Changkyun’s hands are shaking with _want _already.

By the time they get to bed, they’re both naked, still pawing and grabbing at each other without much finesse, and Kihyun licks messy below Changkyun’s ear, nibbles at the base of his throat, arches his back as Changkyun drags his palms all over his hips and lower. There’s lube on Kihyun’s nightstand, which he grabs, and condoms in the drawer, which he does not; he passes the bottle to Changkyun, and Changkyun notices the obvious omission and his eyes go wide. Idiot— what did he think Kihyun had meant? Or maybe he knew what he meant but still can’t believe his luck. His cock is heavy against Kihyun’s hip when Kihyun presses against him, and when they kiss again, it’s deeper, bruising, Kihyun feels the edge of Changkyun’s teeth against his tongue and shivers. 

Kihyun already feels so good. Each time Changkyun touches him, hands slipping up his thighs, over his back, his shoulders, it sends sparks running up and down Kihyun’s spine, and they get caught up in kissing as they always do, licking and sucking at each other’s mouths while they grind together, unhurried but hot, and one of Changkyun’s hands is ostensibly meant to be opening the lube and opening Kihyun up but he’s busy, busy moaning so low that Kihyun’s cock aches with the sound and pulling Kihyun in so tight against himself, so close but still not close enough. Kihyun pushes his fingers down between them to rub over the dripping head of Changkyun’s dick and casts a leg over Changkyun’s waist, urging and inviting him to keep things moving. He doesn’t feel _desperate_, but he’s certainly impatient, ready to be filled, ready to be fucked and adored and sore tomorrow, and Changkyun takes the hint and gets his fingers wet, soaking how they both like it, to press inside Kihyun.

Fuck, he’s good at this, and Kihyun moans high and breathy as Changkyun works him open first on two fingers, then on three, his thumb pressed tight just above where he’s stretching him open to double the stimulation. Now Changkyun is the one kissing on his neck, and Kihyun makes a soft, whimpering noise and tilts his head up, encourages him, because he’s come to terms with Changkyun’s immature preference for leaving lovebites all over Kihyun’s neck and collarbones, but they’re not even _bites_, they don’t even hurt, Changkyun is as careful with him as ever, even now, as he sucks on a mouthful of Kihyun’s sensitive skin. Kihyun is rocking his hips back and forth, and his hand is still trapped between them, fingers circling closed around Changkyun’s cockhead to give him something to fuck into just slightly, just enough to make him throb and groan so deep into the side of Kihyun’s throat. 

“Want you so bad,” Kihyun mumbles, and shivers again when the cool metal of Changkyun’s earring brushes over his flushed skin. “Want you inside me, baby, hurry up.”

He’s not normally very talkative during sex — neither of them is, actually — but he’s feeling generous, wants to get Changkyun off so Changkyun can get him off, and Changkyun responds so predictably, twitching in Kihyun’s loose grip and starting to draw his fingers out of him to replace them with something far more substantial. “You were thinking about it?” Changkyun says, his breath a little rough, his voice a little hoarse, and Kihyun nods, shifts up the bed, spreads his legs, reaches for him to pull him in. 

“All night,” he admits. “All day— and all day the day before that, and before that, for weeks, I’m always— always thinking of you in me.”

Changkyun’s eyesight isn’t very good, but even though his glasses are elsewhere, he’s still looking at Kihyun with as much naked, hungry desire and reverence as if he could see him perfectly, as though he can see every detail of the flush on Kihyun’s cheeks, the wetness of his lower lip, the fine way he’s shivering. “Me, too,” Changkyun says, means it with everything he has, Kihyun can tell, and Changkyun leans down to kiss him, his long-fingered broad-palmed hand sliding over the soft skin of Kihyun’s inner thigh and making Kihyun squirm. 

“Please,” Kihyun whispers, tilting his head into the kiss. It’s not begging, it never has to be, it’s just— a reminder, and Changkyun remembers what he’s meant to be doing, leans back slightly to circle his hand around himself and stroke, get himself slick enough to push inside without hurting Kihyun. He’s watching Kihyun as he does it, those dark unfocused eyes somehow clearer than ever, and Kihyun bites the inside of his lip, watches Changkyun’s hand move over his own dick, his movements so familiar, confident in a way he rarely is in daily life. Kihyun pushes his legs open wider, lifts one up to hitch around Changkyun’s hips, and Changkyun runs his free hand over the arch of Kihyun’s thigh again before he’s lining himself up, impossibly hot and blunt against him, and then he’s starting to slide in and Kihyun’s eyes squeeze shut and he gasps out a helpless noise, his hands grabbing for Changkyun’s hips, his arms, anything.

It’s so much better— so much closer. There’s nothing between them, nothing, and Changkyun is panting, his cock so hot inside of him, the drag of skin on skin unlike anything Kihyun has ever felt before as Changkyun pushes in, pulls back out just enough to let him adjust, then drives back in again, getting him used to the sensation. Kihyun can’t imagine what life was like before this, he’s painfully hard against the flat of his stomach and he opens his eyes again to see Changkyun, to look where he’s reaching when he grabs for him again and pulls him down so their faces are close, so he can rub their cheeks together and moan against his jaw. This isn’t the best angle to fuck at — Changkyun can’t quite get enough leverage to thrust in deep, but Kihyun doesn’t care, wraps his arms around his shoulders and his legs around his waist and kisses blindly under his chin, down to his larynx, breathes that he loves the way he tastes, digs his fingers into the nape of Changkyun’s neck. Changkyun answers in a rumble that’s subharmonic, so deep, and with him so close Kihyun feels it as much as he hears it, and then Changkyun fucks into him again and it must feel too good because his voice starts lifting, breathier, helpless, as if he’s surprised by his own pleasure. 

Kihyun loves how easy Changkyun is, how openly he shows his desire, so unguarded, so reckless, vulnerable, but it’s hard to think about that when Changkyun is fucking him deeper, hoisting him up with a hand on the base of Kihyun’s spine to lift his hips off the bed. Kihyun moans incoherently and presses his face into Changkyun’s shoulder, but Changkyun craves a kiss and seeks him out for one, nudging insistently at his jaw with his mouth until Kihyun obliges him, lets their tongues lap together messy and needy, wet kisses interspersed with harsh breaths and needy moans from both of them. Their voices sound so different normally but now they’re very nearly the same, echoing each other as they go, hoarse and a little sweet and breaking on harsh breaths as Changkyun pulls Kihyun’s hips closer, seats himself deeper inside of him.

It’s nearly enough to come just like this, but Kihyun, ever-greedy, unwraps one arm from around Changkyun’s shoulder and grabs at himself, stroking in fast, urgent motions, his hips working incessantly down with Changkyun’s deep thrusts. Somehow Kihyun always forgets how thick Changkyun is until the last possible moment, until Changkyun is stretching him open so fucking well like he is right now, driving Kihyun’s mind blank, blissful, he’s nothing but pleasure, instinct, letting the natural motion of Changkyun fucking him move his hips up so his cock thrusts into his waiting hand. Changkyun slows down, his moans now softer whines against Kihyun’s neck, and Kihyun gasps as he adjusts to the new pace, the slightly altered angle. Thank God they don’t have neighbors anymore— not that that ever stopped them in the first place. Changkyun braces one hand against the headboard and Kihyun moans again, tilts his head up to catch Changkyun’s bruised, sensitive mouth in a kiss, and he can feel that Changkyun is trying to stave off a fast finish, and he appreciates the thoughtfulness, wants this to last, too. This is as good as it’s ever been, Changkyun such an imposing presence on top of him but so careful, as focused on Kihyun’s pleasure as he is on his own, and they’re kissing, necking, nuzzling into each other while Changkyun’s hips don’t stop, rolling deep and steady, deep inside Kihyun.

When Changkyun’s moans start sounding more like little whimpers, verging on frantic, interspersed with the occasional low noise of effort, that’s when Kihyun knows he’s too close to hold back, and he pets his hands over the backs of his shoulders, inadvertently scratching him as Changkyun fucks into him so well that it makes Kihyun’s vision go all blurred. “You can come,” Kihyun gasps. “In me— I want it.”

He doesn’t know if he’ll like the feeling, he doubts he will, but Changkyun is so intense, so far gone, he moans so low, pulls Kihyun’s leg tighter around his waist, and the muscles of his lower back go tight and tense as he starts to come. Even hotter than before, wet inside Kihyun, and something must be seriously wrong with Kihyun’s head because he kind of loves it, feels heat surge through his skin, sparking out his fingertips, he’s moaning just as much as Changkyun is and he’s not even the one coming. He’s not thinking about the consequences, about the cleanup, not even about the _significance_, it just feels fucking _good_, satisfying some savage, deep-seated urge Kihyun didn’t even know he had, and he feels heady and dazed and so, so close to coming himself, so close, but he needs more, and Changkyun, breath heavy against Kihyun’s shoulder, knows what he needs, knows how he needs it, and he starts to pull out of him — Kihyun makes a wounded, raw noise and tries to close his legs but Changkyun doesn’t let him, because he’s sliding down between them and hitching his thighs over his shoulders. 

“Changkyun,” Kihyun moans, his hands grabbing for Changkyun’s hair, and Changkyun does a neat trick where he braces his elbow against the bed, then pushes his big palm against Kihyun’s lower back, keeps him lifted, and his other hand moves to circle long fingers around his cock while his mouth — always with his fucking mouth — licks at the sweat-glistening tendon between Kihyun’s thigh and his hip, then lower, until Kihyun shudders, oversensitive, at the sensation of Changkyun’s tongue teasing at the very edge of his rim. Kihyun is shaking— he doesn’t know if it’s from the exertion of keeping his abs so tight so he won’t just collapse or it’s from the _feeling_, Changkyun’s tongue deft and teasing and all at once palliative and excruciating. He’s not even licking inside, not even licking him out, just kissing him, worshipful and reverent and slow and wet, while his hand strokes firm and sure, and Kihyun can barely see but he sees Changkyun watching him with his dark, doomed eyes, so eager to witness Kihyun coming because of him. And Kihyun can’t hold back, it’s all too much, and he turns his head to the side and moans out his release, spilling over Changkyun’s fist, his thighs closing just slightly around Changkyun between his legs as he trembles.

Changkyun gives Kihyun time to come down, and when he’s done shaking and when his breath is mostly back to normal, Changkyun moves up the bed, kisses Kihyun with so much soft adoration, then vanishes for a minute or so to track down a washcloth and bottled water for them. Kihyun lies there boneless and soaked and with very few regrets, but that’s the endorphins talking. Maybe 28 won’t be so bad. That’s the endorphins talking, too. He opens his arms to Changkyun when he returns, and they kiss and cuddle while Changkyun wipes the soft spaces between Kihyun’s legs clean, mumbles that they should have put down a towel or something, laughs hoarsely when Kihyun suggests they just sleep in the guest room, who cares about changing the sheets? 

Changkyun kisses his browbone, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. “Happy birthday,” he murmurs, and Kihyun’s laugh is soft and breathless, and he can already feel the soreness starting, but he’ll be mad at Changkyun for that later.

“Thank you,” he sighs. “I haven’t had a birthday this good in, well. Ever, I don’t think.”

Changkyun makes a quiet noise that’s both commiserative and pleased, somehow, and nestles into Kihyun’s cheek, then tilts down until he can burrow under Kihyun’s jaw. Kihyun puts his arms around him, absently brushing his fingertips over the expanse of his shoulders, and sighs again.

“We’d probably have to wake up pretty early to make it to brunch,” he muses. “And it’s already so late. I don’t know about you, but I’m _very _tired.”

Changkyun may not be the brightest star in the sky, but he can pick up on a hint that obvious, at least. “Oh?” he says, and when he breathes, his eyelashes brush against the skin of Kihyun’s neck. “Hmm. Whatever shall we do?”

“Look, they can always visit some other time,” Kihyun shrugs, starting to smile, and kisses the top of Changkyun’s head. “Let’s skip. Claim food poisoning. You can take me to brunch on Sunday or something instead.”

“Deal,” Changkyun grins, and he lifts his head to kiss him properly, and to pull him closer while Kihyun adjusts the sheets and blanket over them. It’s amazing how happy he is to have Kihyun all to himself, and he rubs their legs together for warmth, then steals another small kiss, his eyes starting to get droopy, blinks more lingering, slower. “Are you happy?”

The question catches Kihyun off-guard, but it’s so quiet and so sincere, not even an attempt to get a compliment, he just wants them to be happy together. Kihyun smiles, strokes loving fingers along Changkyun’s jaw, and presses in for another very tiny kiss. 

“Of course,” he whispers. “What an incredible day. I love you so much. Are _you _happy?”

Changkyun nods. “I’m so happy I could die,” he whispers back.

_MONTH 9_

It’s a snowy December in New York City this year. Changkyun will take any excuse to not go to work, and the snow is as good of one as any, keeping him holed up in the apartment for days on end while Kihyun slaves away at the office. Changkyun got them matching cashmere mittens, and Kihyun wears them every day, along with a rotating selection of scarves, also provided by Changkyun. They watch a seemingly endless series of Hallmark Christmas-themed movies and go, on Kihyun’s lunch breaks, to various Christmas markets to drink mulled wine or spiced apple cider. Kihyun asks if Changkyun wants to get a tree; Changkyun goes a little pink and admits that he gets one provided to him every year, they’ll be coming to set it up on the 14th. “But can we decorate it ourselves?” is Kihyun’s response, and that works like a charm, doesn’t it, Changkyun is so easy to please that it’s often embarrassing to watch. 

Of course Changkyun loves Christmas. A boy who had his family taken from him is never going to stop craving a life he probably never even had — Kihyun somehow doubts that the late Mr. and Mrs. Im wanted to wear checkered flannel pajamas and sit by the fire listening to Bing Crosby. And yet Changkyun is obsessed with it, thrives on it, and Kihyun has no doubt that by the end of this, while the entirety of his life he himself has felt neutral at best about Christmas, come January he’ll actively hate the whole fucking season. 

Thanks to Kihyun’s influence, they cook dinner for themselves at least twice a week. But beyond that, there’s not much Kihyun can do about Changkyun’s idiotic lifestyle, so most days, he doesn’t even bother trying to correct his behavior. There’ll be time for that later. For now he grits his teeth and endures it, since by far the worst part of living with Changkyun is Changkyun himself, not anything he does specifically. He’s a scourge, a blight on Kihyun’s otherwise impeccable existence, and there _is _an easy fix for him but Kihyun can’t carry it out yet. Despite Changkyun’s noble declaration that Kihyun isn’t a prisoner here, Kihyun very much feels like one — he’s trapped. But he has a way out. He can see the calendar counting down every time he closes his eyes. It’s only a matter of time, and Kihyun can be patient.

Kihyun gets Changkyun’s Christmas presents about a week in advance; he tells Changkyun he’s doing all his Christmas shopping today and not to ask about it, then takes the train into Brooklyn, ugh. His destination is some sort of haven for hipsters, a combo bookstore-record store-tattoo studio-ice cream parlor, and Kihyun peruses their selection for a while until he finds what he’s looking for, which is an assortment of various sickeningly pretentious poetry chapbooks by local writers and the band Tooth’s full-length debut album. All told, it runs him a mere $18, but he knows Changkyun will love it beyond words — he’s such a “it’s the thought that counts” person. What’s he going to get Kihyun? A novelty cookbook illustrated with Leyendecker men doing all the cooking? Probably something as intolerably tacky as anything else Changkyun has ever gotten him. God, everything about that man makes Kihyun’s skin crawl, and his frown as he thinks about him on the subway ride back to Manhattan is so dark and gloomy that the other passengers of the C train give him a wide berth. 

Christmas Eve and Christmas morning are as storybook as Changkyun wanted them to be. It’s snowing when they fall asleep on the 24th, and by the time they’re waking up on the 25th, everything is covered in a thick blanket of fine, powdery snow, and their windows are decorated with a frosty filigree, ice crystals twisted and turned in outlandish patterns. Changkyun, pajama-clad and rumple-haired, makes them both coffee while Kihyun turns on the strings of lights wrapped around the tree and lights up the fireplace. They snuggle on the rug, cozy and warm, and go through the motions of something that Kihyun can tell is going to be a tradition between them going forward, in the little time they have left together: they open Christmas cards bought earlier that week, with the intent of trying to out-silly each other. The one Kihyun had gotten for Changkyun is a singing card, three snowmen wearing jingly hats and rattling around to the tune of “Jingle Bell Rock,” and Changkyun’s for Kihyun features a moose with his antlers decorated and a quippy caption about global warming, as though that’s anything to joke about. The cards go on the mantle, and Changkyun and Kihyun go back on the rug to snuggle more, but eventually, Kihyun sees the impatient way Changkyun keeps eyeing the scant few parcels under the tree, so he laughs very softly at him and kisses him on the cheek, then moves forward to retrieve them.

“You first,” Kihyun says gently, handing his two thin packages — perfectly, impeccably wrapped, the tape not even visible, the edges crisp and sharp — to Changkyun to open. 

“Okay!” Changkyun says, so eager and excited, and tears through Kihyun’s handiwork without even bothering to admire the quality of the wrapping. Kihyun bites the inside of his cheek to hold back a sneer, but makes sure he looks anticipatory, just a little nervous, as Changkyun finishes removing the paper and takes out the contents.

“There’s a little bit of a backstory,” Kihyun explains, cheeks flushed, watching Changkyun leaf through the chapbooks with wonder. “The store I went to, they were having a poetry festival this month, and something about— there’s a poem somewhere in the middle of the pink one that just really made me think of you. I thought you’d like them. You keep saying you want to read more modern poetry.”

“I do keep saying that,” Changkyun murmurs, glancing up from the thin pages to look at Kihyun, eyes so tender and adoring. “I can’t wait to read them. Thank you.”

“Open the other one,” Kihyun suggests, blushing more, and Changkyun nods, carefully sets the pamphlets aside, tears the paper open on the second gift, and laughs with all the merry, bubbling excitement of a child when he sees what it is.

“No way!” he grins, turning the disc over to read the song list. “Tooth! Hell yes. I’m surprised they make CDs, I’d expect them to only have it on cassette.”

“Right? Or laserdisc,” Kihyun agrees, and his posture is tense, apprehensive, hands twisted together in his lap, he’s waiting for Changkyun to notice. 

Changkyun does, of course, and leans over for a kiss. “Thank you so much, babe,” he murmurs. “You’re so thoughtful. These are both the perfect gifts.”

“Sorry they’re small,” Kihyun starts to say, but Changkyun shushes him — Kihyun sees red for a moment, but he breathes through it, lets Changkyun kiss him again — and soothes him, assures him that he definitely doesn’t need any more _stuff _and these are such meaningful representations of how Kihyun sees him, of a meaningful moment in their relationship. Fucking calm down, Kihyun wants to tell him. It’s a couple shitty books and an even worse CD. But he accepts the praise all the same, replies that he’s happy Changkyun likes it, and makes grabby hands for the lumpy package waiting for him under the tree.

It’s heavy in Kihyun’s hands, and the wrapping is appalling. A child’s handiwork. No, even a child could do better than this. Does Changkyun have _no _practical skills? Kihyun knows perfectly well that he does not, but it never fails to come as an unpleasant surprise when Kihyun is forcibly reminded of that fact. He slides a fingertip under an uneven edge, moves it sharply across to rip the tape, and starts to unwrap the present, expecting socks, and it’s— and it’s—

“Oh,” Kihyun says dumbly, staring down at the box in his hands. 

“Is it the right kind?” Changkyun asks, anxious. “I consulted with Minhyuk about it, but he couldn’t remember if you preferred digital— I got one that shoots on film, too, it’s in the closet.”

A Hasselblad. Not even the industry standard — _above _the standard. The industry’s goal. The world’s most coveted camera. The finest money can buy, and Kihyun knows for a fact that it costs a _lot _of money, the cheapest models start at $15,000, and this one is _big,_ a hefty DSLR, it can’t have been less than $35,000, and Changkyun reaches under the tree to bring out smaller packages that presumably contain lenses and accessories. Mother of God, the Hasselblad H6D. Kihyun has never even seen one in real life, and now he _owns _one. To his horror, he feels his eyes starting to well up with hot tears, he has a lump in his throat, and he’s tongue-tied as he turns the box in his hands, his fingers shake as he starts to open the lid. Nobody has ever— ever cared this much about him, ever. About his stupid little hobby, his girly interest in taking pictures. Kihyun carefully, carefully sets the box down on the rug and presses his hand over his eyes, overwhelmed, takes in a steadying breath.

“Kihyun?” Changkyun prompts gently, and Kihyun shakes his head slightly, rubs his tears away, and opens his arms for Changkyun to come to him. 

It’s not real, he reminds himself, as he presses his trembling mouth to Changkyun’s cheek. It’s only temporary. But God _damn _if he doesn’t feel treasured. “Thank you,” he breathes. “Thank you, Changkyun, sweetheart, thank you. I don’t— I don’t even know what to—”

“You’re welcome,” Changkyun murmurs, silencing all Kihyun’s fluttering gratitude, his arms strong around Kihyun’s waist. “You just have to promise to use it, I want to see your pictures.”

“I promise,” Kihyun says, a small, wet smile on his face, and nestles into the warmth of him. “I’m so— God, thank you. You didn’t have to, baby, you really didn’t have to.”

“I know, but I wanted to,” Changkyun shrugs. He kisses the side of Kihyun’s head, runs his palm down Kihyun’s back, and draws him in closer. Kihyun rests his head on Changkyun’s shoulder and curls his fingers in the soft material of his pajamas, closes his eyes to stave off any more traitorous emotion, and they stay like that for a little while, listening to the crackle of the fire and each other’s breathing.

“This is so unfair,” Kihyun murmurs, his hand splayed out over Changkyun’s heart. “I don’t have anything to give you, nothing like this.”

Changkyun frowns, drawing back to look down at him. “What? You give me everything, Kihyun. The only thing I need is you, and maybe for you to make those stuffed peppers for lunch again, if you want.”

“Of course,” Kihyun laughs, nuzzles their cheeks together, kisses him just in front of his ear. “Any time you want, my love. It’s a really easy recipe. Do you want me to teach you?”

Changkyun nods with so much besotted eagerness and lets Kihyun pull him to his feet, then into the kitchen. And that’s where they spend the rest of the day, cooking and kissing and playing around, Kihyun waiting for the camera battery to charge so he can test it out. The first picture he ever takes on it is one of Changkyun, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his smile big and blinding, all that unguarded youthful adoration shining bright, a smudge of flour in his hair, somehow, and the second picture Kihyun takes is of both of them together, nearly the same as the first but now with Kihyun pressing a kiss to Changkyun’s cheek. It’s cute, almost. Kihyun managed to make his eyes look alive, just as long as the shutter was clicking. He points the camera at Changkyun again: ready, aim, fire.

_MONTH 10_

The new year — 2020, imagine that. They ring it in together. Champagne and dinner reservations at a restaurant at the top of a skyscraper so they can see the fireworks. Any resolutions? To be better, Changkyun answers thoughtfully. “Mine is to make all my dreams come true,” Kihyun says, and kisses him while the sky lights up in gold and white flame. 

_MONTH 11_

The anniversary of Changkyun’s parents passing comes every February, apparently. So he spends the whole month brooding more than usual, even goes to work a few times of his own volition, and Kihyun, long-suffering in every sense of the term, holds his hand through it, doesn’t push him, doesn’t pry, doesn’t get frustrated, doesn’t impose, doesn’t complain, doesn’t think, doesn’t feel. He just waits, kisses him hello every night, cooks three times a week, tells Changkyun he loves him so frequently that the word _love _loses all linguistic meaning, it’s just sound, just noise. 

Brooding makes Changkyun ruminative, sometimes to the point of chattiness. He’s always verging on melancholy, even when he’s at his happiest, but he doesn’t often want to talk about it; now, however, he does, coaxing Kihyun into deep conversations about mortality, the meaning of life, predestination. “You’re too good to be true,” he tells Kihyun softly on more than one occasion. “It really was fate that we met. Don’t know what I’d do without you.” Kihyun never knows what Changkyun expects him to do when he says that, so he does something slightly different every time, either just kissing him or just blushing or echoing the sentiment, and Changkyun is appeased no matter what he does, and the conversation moves on.

But sometimes it moves on to darker things, too. Changkyun, his head pillowed on Kihyun’s lap while Kihyun cards gentle fingers through his thick hair, tells Kihyun in a hushed, low voice about his blue periods, his unhappier days, the depression that pursued him through high school and college. There were some scary thoughts, some semi-legitimate attempts, but nothing that caused lasting damage physical or psychological. And he’ll never do it again, he swears, not after what happened to his family, never again. Kihyun has been working on his ability to cry on command, and finally he has the chance to use it, hastily swiping glistening tears from his lower eyelids as he listens to Changkyun. “I know you don’t think that way anymore, but it just breaks my heart that you could ever feel so sad,” he explains, artfully unsteady, tries to smile for him. “I wish I could have been there for you.”

Changkyun shrugs one shoulder, leans up to cup Kihyun’s cheek in his hand, thumb rubbing lightly over his skin. “You’re here now,” he murmurs. 

“And I always will be,” Kihyun says and turns his head to kiss into the heart of his palm.

_MONTH 12_

Even though they’ve been together for nearly a year, they still make time to go on dates, be they lunch in some park or experimental stagings of Marlowe’s early works. Sometimes they just sit together and _learn _about each other, typically through doing personality quizzes online. Changkyun’s love languages are physical touch and words of affirmation — Kihyun could have told him that from the day they met. Kihyun’s are, of course, acts of service and receiving gifts, but he manipulates the test until it gives him quality time as a result. 

Kihyun can’t stand how long this has taken. He knew he’d have to run this out for the long haul, and it’s not over yet, but almost a _year,_ that’s so much of his life, so much of his life devoted to this farce, this deception, this heart-sick lovelorn weakling of a man. But this is the month in which things change; this month, Changkyun is going to propose to him, and Kihyun is going to say yes.

He knows Changkyun has been thinking about it. Changkyun looks a little _too _closely at his fingers sometimes — he must have started ring shopping. The last time he’d asked, it had been too soon, but a year is very much long enough to wait, even in this day and age when millennial marriage rates are at an all time low. Knowing him, he’ll want to do it in a grand gesture, so Kihyun spends his days tense and waiting for some sort of invitation, maybe out to the opera again, maybe to another Michelin starred restaurant, maybe to an exclusive after-hours event held at the Met. He’s ready, he knows what he’ll say. It’s not a _speech, _and really all he has to say is yes, but he has something planned regardless. He practices his face in the mirror, just the right amount of shock-joy-excitement-adoration-wonderment, until it’s perfect, indistinguishable from the real, it’ll probably bring a tear to Changkyun’s eye to see him so alight with love, fondness, anticipation for their shared future. All he has to do is ask.

Their routine is straightforward. They wake up, Kihyun’s alarm sounding ten minutes before it has to so they have time to laze around, kiss, nestle, then they have a light breakfast and Changkyun sends Kihyun off into the snapping jaws of corporate America; most days they meet for lunch, even now, and on the weekends they tend to stay in, not even exploring the city much unless Kihyun pretends to have some kind of wanderlust. Kihyun’s job schedule, for better or for worse, is fairly punishing — he can’t be late, he can’t leave early, and he’d prefer to save his vacation days, or so he tells Changkyun. Changkyun, back in the day, had pouted over this, very softly complained that he wished they could sleep in during the week sometimes, or that he’d love to take Kihyun on a longer trip than their little LA getaway, but living with Kihyun for so long has established fairly clearly that Kihyun’s situation isn’t changing anytime soon, so he may as well get used to it. And he has gotten used to it, barely ever whines in the morning anymore, doesn’t email Kihyun links to articles about exotic vacation hot spots, hasn’t wheedled Kihyun for information on his next office holiday for so long.

Until now: when Kihyun gets back from refilling his water bottle, he checks his phone to see that Changkyun has texted him. _Think I need to get out of the city for a weekend, the pollen’s killing me today. Would you be able to take Friday off?_

Grand gesture. Kihyun shivers, sets his bottle down before he can drop it, and just calls Changkyun instead, wanting some answers so he doesn’t get his hopes up for nothing. 

“Hello?” Changkyun murmurs, and Kihyun swallows his reflexive reaction to the sound of his voice over the phone, he’s gotten pretty good at either ignoring or controlling it by now. He just smiles, sits up straighter, drums his fingertips against his desk.

“I think I could. What do you have in mind? Poor thing, want me to pick up some Zyrtec on the way back?”

“Nah, it’s fine,” Changkyun says. He doesn’t even sound congested, and he hadn’t been sneezing in the morning — as far as seasonal allergies go, his are extremely weak, and with each word, Kihyun gets more and more convinced he’s just come up with this as a cover to get Kihyun alone. “I was thinking we could go up to my place in South Bristol. You know, the lakehouse?”

Ah, how could Kihyun forget. They haven’t been yet, but he’s seen pictures of the property, purchased by Changkyun’s family as soon as they’d come to the States and visited twice-yearly at a minimum. It’s on Canandaigua Lake, about an hour and a half away by plane, and based on the family photos, the house itself seems luxurious and comfortable, something like five bedrooms, right on the water, they even have a small boat for midday outings. _Grand gesture. _“Oh, gosh, that’d be wonderful!” Kihyun says with a dreamy little sigh. “This Friday? You mean, like, the day after tomorrow?”

“Is that too short notice?” Changkyun says, anxious all of a sudden, and _yes, _Kihyun can feel it, this is the proposal. If it weren’t, he wouldn’t be this nervous about making it happen so quickly, he’d just say they could go some other time, but he planned for this, he was waiting for the right moment, and the right moment is, evidently, this weekend.

“No, not at all, I’ll figure something out,” Kihyun assures him. “I’ll talk to my boss as soon as we hang up. Are we driving up there, or…?”

“We’ll take the jet,” Changkyun says, no hesitation, and Kihyun takes in a shaky breath, bites his lip to hold back his absurdly dopey grin. _Finally. _Finally he gets what he deserves. Took Changkyun long enough. Kihyun would be mad if he weren’t so thrilled. 

“Oh, we will, will we,” he says once he’s come back to himself a little, still smiling. “Okay, I’ll work it out with my boss, we can talk about it more when I get home.”

“Okay,” Changkyun says and makes a kissy noise at the phone. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

He says that every time something comes up at work, and while Kihyun would love to just let Changkyun loose on his boss, he’d prefer to keep his job for now, just for the sake of propriety. “I will, babe,” Kihyun says, smiling anyway. “Love you. See you later.”

“Love you,” Changkyun says and hangs up, and for once, Kihyun is so thoroughly tickled pink with how well things are coming along that he doesn’t even immediately drop the smile he’d put up over the course of the conversation, like he usually has to do. He lets it linger for a moment, gloating, but he won’t count his eggs until they’re hatched, so he smoothes out his expression, then gets up and heads for his boss’s office to start getting these nails hammered into the coffin before it’s too late.

It works. He gets the day off. Changkyun is so happy when Kihyun tells him, and it’s so funny to watch him flounder to explain that he’s just relieved that he gets to get out of this congested city and fill his lungs with some fresh air for a change, nothing more. It’s okay, Kihyun soothes him, he can barely wait, either. He gets stir-crazy in Manhattan, sometimes, too. Who doesn’t? He’s excited to see the place, besides. Changkyun grew up there, in a way, it was an important place in his early life, and he’ll be at his most vulnerable once he steps inside those hallowed halls, so defenseless, none the wiser as Kihyun coils, preparing to strike. Well, Kihyun doesn’t say that last part out loud. He just kisses Changkyun an awful lot and tells him, once again, that he can barely wait.

They pack their bags on Thursday night; the jet, at Changkyun’s beck and call now that the repairs are long since finished, is cleared to leave Friday morning. Kihyun wonders where Changkyun has been hiding the ring, and also spares a fleeting moment for wondering if he’s wrong about all this, if maybe this isn’t the proposal, if Changkyun just genuinely wants a weekend getaway, nothing more. It’s unlikely, but it is a possibility, so he keeps his expectations in check as they stack their luggage in the trunk of the hired car and cuddle up together in the back. They’re not flying out of JFK or LaGuardia, no, they’re headed into Westchester County to fly out of an airport _specifically _for “executive” flights, and Changkyun is napping against Kihyun’s shoulder on the drive but Kihyun is too wired to sleep. He holds Changkyun’s sweaty hand and looks out of the window, watching the city pass him by, and gently jostles Changkyun awake once they’ve arrived in White Plains. Changkyun smiles drowsily at him, gives the corner of his mouth a clumsy kiss, yawns, stretches, says, “Canandaigua, here we come!” — horribly mispronouncing it, of course — and gets out of the car first when the driver opens the door for him. Kihyun, behind his back, rolls his eyes and follows.

Security is astoundingly brief, almost criminally lax. They don’t even have to wait once in the terminal, they’re led directly to the jet. Kihyun knows, he’s known since very nearly day one, several days before day one, that Changkyun has a private jet, and yet part of him still can’t believe it, it’s beyond human comprehension, and yet _there it is, _waiting for them on the tarmac. “That’s it, there,” Changkyun says with a casual shrug, pointing, and Kihyun can scarcely breathe, his heart is in his throat, that’s his future husband’s private jet, that’s _his _future private jet. 

It’s small and elegant, a pointed nose and slim wings, and Kihyun feels an odd sense of kinship with it. They board up one of those little side staircases like Jackie Kennedy, and the interior is _gorgeous, _plush leather, soft carpet, all light, tasteful, bottles of chilled spring water already waiting for them. Kihyun can’t stop smiling, couldn’t if he tried, and he lets Changkyun guide him to one of the chairs, but it’s not even a _chair, _it’s like a chaise, more comfortable and spacious than any of Changkyun’s apartment seating. Kihyun luxuriates in this, looks out of the window, smiles so radiantly at the pilot when he boards, and in fact, he’s so happy that he very nearly forgets Changkyun’s _history _with planes, with private jets specifically. Fucking Changkyun and his tragic backstory ruining everything, as usual. Of course this isn’t the jet Changkyun’s parents died in, that one was unsalvageable, but still, it’s got to bring up some negative associations, and Kihyun reaches across the table to hold Changkyun’s hand, leans down to kiss his knuckles in soft, grateful devotion and reassurance that all will be well. Meanwhile, he’s looking around the jet with his peripherals. There is a bar and at least one TV. He’d thought maybe there would be a bedroom, a stripper pole at the very least, but this is very unostentatious. And yet Kihyun isn’t all that disappointed. He just smiles at Changkyun as the plane drives away from the airport and onto the runway, asks if he’s okay in hushed tones, fights to keep down his excitement and restrain himself from just telling Changkyun to take a Xanax and calm the fuck down.

They’re wheels up in another fifteen minutes. Kihyun can’t say that the ride is smoother than a commercial plane, but it still feels like it psychologically, and he loves watching the city and the land grow pin-sized underneath him. Changkyun’s hand is tense in his own. Kihyun doesn’t talk much on the journey, and he doesn’t read the book he’d brought with him, he just looks out over the view, and when he looks at Changkyun again he sees that he’s fallen asleep, avoiding his problems and fears instead of facing them head-on. Typical. Kihyun refuses to let this experience be spoiled, keeps their fingers linked, leans his head back against the impossibly soft material of the seat, listens to the hum and rumble of the engine, breathes in the crisp filtered air, curls his toes in his shoes, rolls his shoulders back so he doesn’t feel stiff later, smiles at Changkyun when his eyes slip half-open. The hour and a half goes by in a heartbeat, and Kihyun never thought he’d be the sort of person to enjoy travel for the sake of travel — what’s the point, if you’re not seeing something you couldn’t already have at home? — but he never wants to leave this jet, finds himself very nearly disappointed when he feels the lurch at the pit of his stomach that typically accompanies a plane’s descent. But Changkyun is visibly relieved, and Kihyun has to go over to him and share his seat so they can be close, fuck the FAA and their seatbelt regulations. Changkyun kisses his neck and rests his head on his shoulder as the wheels of the jet make contact with the Rochester runway, and Kihyun has already forgotten about the journey, he can practically taste the destination on his tongue. 

A descent down that presidential staircase, a brief walk to yet another hired car, and an hour’s drive from the airport to the lake. As soon as they’ve landed, Changkyun’s mood improves drastically, and they spend a good portion of the drive trying and mostly failing to pronounce the name of the lake correctly; the rest is taken up by Changkyun babbling excitedly about the house itself, the property, the small grove of fruit trees, the lake view, the wine cellar, his childhood bedroom. The whole place was redone a few years ago, but it’s not too different from how Changkyun remembers it, barring some new coats of paint. He can’t wait for Kihyun to see it, he says, and Kihyun can’t wait for a lot of things, but he does anyway, smiles at Changkyun and agrees with him, always agrees, and leans up for a kiss as the driver takes them through the countryside. It looks a lot like the area where Kihyun grew up, actually, but this isn’t about Kihyun’s nostalgia or lack thereof, it’s all about Changkyun, so he hums and nods and smiles along while Changkyun tells him everything, every thought that comes into his head pertaining to this journey from the airport to the house, how he used to make up stories about the clouds and their shapes to pass the time, how that barn on that hill over there used to give him nightmares, how one year he played video games the whole ride and made himself so motion sick that he threw up as soon as they arrived. Kihyun is listening attentively, but in his head, the countdown timer is starting to flash red.

God, Kihyun hates it when the drive to and from the airport takes longer than the flight itself, that’s a cardinal sin in his book, but they finally arrive. Kihyun strains and cranes to look out of the window to see the house, and Changkyun laughs softly, just as excited as he is, and guides him out of the car. The driver will bring their bags up. Kihyun looks ahead, looks up at the house, and, well, it’s a McMansion on a hill, but it’s his now, so he doesn’t mind it quite so much. 

“It’s beautiful,” he says, then turns to look at the lake and performs a gasp, enchanted by the view, leans in closer to Changkyun, smiling so brightly. “How are your allergies?”

“Never better,” Changkyun says, his smile just as blinding, and leads him by the hand to the front door. “Grand tour?”

“Please,” Kihyun agrees, watching Changkyun key in a code to unlock the house, but he’s not here to sightsee, he’s here to get affianced. And once Changkyun has opened the door and gallantly shown him in, his suspicions are confirmed; it’s a typically nouveau-riche tacky lakeside paradise, exposed wood beams decorating the ceiling, grandiose mantles, nautical decorations on the walls, enormous windows with stunning views but bespoiled by tartan curtains. They’ll be staying in the master suite — Changkyun has stayed there once before when he came here with his friends post-college, but not since, and he admits that it’s never not going to be weird to sleep in his parents’ room — but Changkyun first shows him the room that had been his when he was little, painted a muted mint, faded glow-in-the-dark stars still clinging to the ceiling. Kihyun’s smile is tight as he pictures the scrawny, delicate child he must have been, staying up through the night to read the books from the shelves on either side of the bay window, skinning his knees as he fell running down to the edge of the water. Speaking of the water, Changkyun takes them outside next because they’re closer to the back door, and they see the orchard, stonefruit trees mixed in with apples and pears. It’s too early in the year for them to bear anything, Changkyun apologizes, they’re usually only ripe by autumn, but they can come back in September, if Kihyun would like. “I’d love to,” Kihyun says and kisses him against the slender trunk of one of the plum trees, until Changkyun is blushing, panting hushed breaths against Kihyun’s mouth, and shyly suggesting they continue the tour.

They see the second floor; here’s the master bedroom, at last. The best part is, as usual, the bathroom, where Kihyun _finally _gets his clawfoot tub and it is _glorious, _larger than some jacuzzis he’s seen, with a direct view right over the lake. There are three other bedrooms adjacently, and Changkyun makes a vague reference to possibly having some people over sometime, and while Kihyun has no doubt that his friends would love to stay here some hazy summer, he’s still here on a mission, and encourages Changkyun the minimum possible amount to keep things moving. 

Back downstairs, Changkyun shows Kihyun the kitchen, which is already stocked thoroughly with as many groceries as either of them could ever want. Seems excessive, and too well-planned, for a last-minute three-day trip to avoid city smog, and Kihyun’s smile is there to stay as Changkyun guides him through the additional living room, the family room, the sitting room, the multipurpose library. That’s the end of the tour, and Kihyun can’t resist, he suggests they take a bath to unwind from a long morning of travel, so that’s exactly what they do. Changkyun runs the water while Kihyun strips off, and Kihyun comes up behind him and runs a delicate, intent hand over Changkyun’s side, pushing his shirt up his waist, making him shiver. Changkyun asks in a murmur whether Kihyun wants bubble bath, and Kihyun says sure, why not, pulls Changkyun’s shirt off for him, has to leave him alone so Changkyun can get the bottle, but he’s back with him in another moment, petting over his skin, undoing his belt, smiling into his shoulder when Changkyun makes a small noise. And then they’re slipping into the water on opposite ends of the bath, Kihyun first, then Changkyun joining him, and it feels divine, of course it’s regular bathwater and regular soap but it feels so _wealthy,_ and Kihyun closes his eyes for just a moment as he leans his head back against the fine porcelain wall of the tub but then opens them again, looking out at the lake instead. 

There’s room enough in this bath for both of them; they’re not even cramped. Sure, neither of them is particularly tall, but _still._ Kihyun turns his head to look at Changkyun and finds that Changkyun was looking at him already, and the edge of Kihyun’s mouth lifts in a smile and he crooks a finger to invite Changkyun over to him. Changkyun moves slowly, carefully, not wanting to splash water onto the marble floors, but he ends up in Kihyun’s arms soon enough, his wet fingers curling around the edge of the tub while Kihyun kisses him so sweetly, licking into his mouth while he thinks about drowning him here and now. “I’m so glad you’re here,” Changkyun breathes, and Kihyun couldn’t agree with him more.

The water is hot and yet Changkyun still shivers when Kihyun touches him, sensitive on his thighs and on his chest, and Kihyun wants to hurt him but just a little, wants to leave bites that he could press a thumb into and make Changkyun whine, half-moon scratches on his easily-marked skin, bruises on the curves of his aristocratic wrists from holding them too tightly, that’s all, but he refrains, just circles his fingers so kindly around his dick and ruts their bodies together, hungrily swallows down the deep way Changkyun moans, stiffening in his palm, easy as anything, and their kiss is so languid, slick and sensual and cool in temperature against the steam of the water. Kihyun’s shoulders and his left arm, above the surface, are prickled with chills. And Changkyun is weightless atop him, one of his hands moving to stroke Kihyun as well, until their hands are too much in the way and all it takes to get them off is the motions of their bodies, hips fitting together, cocks sliding in tandem, perfect skin on skin, Changkyun muffling his beautiful noises in the arch of Kihyun’s neck, Kihyun kissing any inch of him that’s near, the taste of his skin fresh and bitter from the soap in the water between them, and finally Kihyun comes, barely touched, so worked up by this whole morning, the private jet, the multi-million-dollar lakefront property, everything, and Changkyun’s done not long after, his fingers clutching so helpless at Kihyun’s firm shoulders. They collapse against each other, out of breath and overheated, but Kihyun can’t abide staying in a bathtub in this condition, so they’re draining the water and toweling each other off soon enough, smiling, effusive, so giddy and young and in love. 

And that’s all that happens on Friday, really. There’s no town to go into, they stay at the house. Changkyun offers to take them out on the lake but Kihyun doesn’t trust his boating skills so he makes up an excuse about easy seasickness, and they lounge around in the larger living room and watch the birds outside, listen to some music, watch an old movie, have dinner at some point. Nothing else. _Fuck._

Saturday, neither. In the morning they have a leisurely breakfast and watch cartoons on local stations, and in the late afternoon they go for a brisk walk around the five-acre property, chatting about the Iliad, then come back inside to raid the wine cellar. Inspired by their conversation and wine-silly after sharing two bottles of red, Kihyun lets Changkyun fuck him like the ancient Greeks did, between his thighs, one of Changkyun’s hands holding so tightly onto his waist and the other keeping Kihyun’s legs pinned shut, Kihyun gasping against the finely woven Persian rug. For the sake of historical accuracy, they’d used olive oil to slick up Kihyun’s skin, and at first Kihyun had worried about whether the rug would survive, but Changkyun had made _such _a dismissive noise at Kihyun’s concern, as though it was ridiculous to even _consider_ that he wouldn’t be able to replace it with a snap of his fingers, and that alone had been enough to get Kihyun sufficiently riled as to permit Changkyun to make him kinaidos to his erastes. Changkyun is moaning low into the side of Kihyun’s neck, and Kihyun might have a hell of a friction burn tomorrow but he doesn’t care, Changkyun comes in a hot spill over Kihyun’s inner thighs and his arms wrap firm and close around Kihyun’s waist as Kihyun works himself to an equally spectacular conclusion. And after that, _still _nothing, just some cuddling and reminiscing and then bedtime, eventually.

Is Changkyun going to wait until the very last second? Is he going to do it at all? Kihyun can’t take the waiting, the uncertainty, that’s the very worst part. They don’t have that much time left — their flight leaves at nine tomorrow evening. Changkyun is acting very normal. None of his nervous energy from the phonecall or from the drive. There is no fucking way Kihyun misinterpreted things, _no _way is he leaving this fucking house without a ring on his finger, but it takes two to tango, and he’s just waiting for Changkyun to get with the program. They go to bed shortly after midnight, and Kihyun lies there curled around Changkyun’s back, not asleep but faking it until Changkyun’s breaths even out, too, and thinks about what the fuck he’s going to do if he was wrong. 

Kihyun wakes up later upon feeling the mattress shift. It takes him a moment to open his eyes, and another to reach over to the empty half of the bed, feeling the absence of Changkyun. He sits up, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, and looks at the clock on the nightstand; 6:33 AM. Christ, what the fuck is he up to now? Kihyun reluctantly drags himself out of bed, pulls on a dressing gown and slippers, and starts shuffling through the empty halls to find him.

There is a small landing overlooking an east-facing window, right by the staircase leading down to the family room. Changkyun is sitting there on the floor, braced back on his palms, and pensively watching the sky go from black to blue. He hears Kihyun’s footsteps approaching and turns his head to see him, and though he smiles, he doesn’t offer an immediate explanation or apology, just lets Kihyun come up and sit down by his side, their shoulders touching. 

Kihyun sits there with him in silence for a minute or two, just looking out over the sky, the lake. “Are you alright?” he asks, quiet and soft, still a nighttime voice even as the sun rises. Is this a family flashback thing, has sleeping in his late parents’ room finally gotten to him? Kihyun can deal with that, but he’d rather not do it at six in the fucking morning. He shivers, stifling a yawn, and pulls his robe tighter around himself, and Changkyun puts his arm around him, rubbing at his shoulder to keep him warm.

“I’m fine,” Changkyun says. “Woke up a little while ago and couldn’t fall back asleep. Figured I may as well come out here and watch the sunrise.”

“Mm.” Kihyun leans his head against Changkyun’s chest and listens to his breathing, the steady beat of his heart. And as he listens, it picks up just a little, reminding Kihyun that he’s alive, why both of them are here. His grip is warm and steady on Kihyun’s cold, brittle frame, and Kihyun wants to close his eyes so he can better focus on the sound, the feeling, but he might fall asleep if he does that, so he keeps them on the horizon as the sun starts to lift over the water. 

“You’re my best friend,” Changkyun says, and there’s a bird singing outside, a nightingale or a warbler, and Kihyun lifts his head from Changkyun’s shoulder to look at his face.

“You’re my best friend, too,” he murmurs. Changkyun is starting to smile, starting in his eyes, and he doesn’t even have his glasses on, he can’t even see the sunrise in all its glory, the only thing within range of his weak, myopic vision is Kihyun. Kihyun smiles back, and all of a sudden he can’t look away, Changkyun still has his arm around him and Kihyun’s mouth is dry and, unbidden, he says, “Ask me again.”

Changkyun looks at him for a long moment. Kihyun’s heart is pounding wildly in his chest and Changkyun draws his arm back from around his shoulders and leans in to brush his lips against Kihyun’s cheek. “Be right back,” he whispers, and gets up and goes.

Fuck. _Fuck. _Kihyun fucked up. This is why Kihyun doesn’t beg, this is why he doesn’t second-guess his intuition. He looks out at the water, at the sun on the tips of the trees, curls his fingers in the sleeves of his dressing gown so he doesn’t get colder than he is, and, just in case, just in case he hasn’t fucked everything up for himself, for them, he runs over his pre-rehearsed response in his head. _You beat me to it— I love you so much, Changkyun, yes, of _course _I will, a thousand times yes I said yes I will yes, I love you so much, I’m so— I love you! I can’t fucking _wait _to be married to you! _The sun rises higher. Changkyun hasn’t come back yet. Kihyun shifts his position, rubs his eyes again, and tries to focus on his breathing. Then he hears footsteps and his careful count of in for four, out for seven, is lost completely, and he turns to look at him, hoping his expression is right, knowing it’s beyond his control.

Changkyun has something in his hand. His face gives nothing away. He comes to sit in his previous spot, but now he’s facing Kihyun instead of the window, and Kihyun can’t take it, his heart is going to give out, and Changkyun reaches out for Kihyun’s left with his right and Kihyun bites the inside of his cheek hard enough to draw blood.

“Kihyun,” Changkyun begins in his low, serious voice. He must have rehearsed this, too. Kihyun can’t breathe. “You’re my best friend. You’re the love of my life. You’ve brought everything to me, you’ve completely changed the way I see the world, you make me look forward to every single day, because every single day with you is so new and wonderful and different, every time. I never want to be apart from you. And I want to be with you for as long as we both can be. I’d ask you to make me the happiest man alive by saying yes, but you’ve _already _made me the happiest man alive just by being you, so I’ll just ask.”

His other palm opens. He’s holding a black box, and when his index finger presses to the latch, the lid lifts to reveal a narrow silver band. Kihyun stares at the ring, all lit up by the warm light flooding into the room, and raises his eyes to see Changkyun’s face as Changkyun looks at him. This is his life. This is the first day of the rest of his life. It could still be a dream. It’s not a dream. Kihyun looks at the ring in the box again and swallows hard and tries to take in a full breath, so nervous, so afraid, and Changkyun’s thumb runs over the knuckles of Kihyun’s left hand and starts uncurling his fingers for him.

“Kihyun,” Changkyun says again. He’d known exactly what Kihyun had meant by _ask me again_— he might have just been waiting for his cue. Kihyun can feel his pulse under his skin, and it’s just as fast as his own, rabbit-scared. They look at each other. The bird is still singing. Changkyun takes a breath, grips Kihyun’s hand — shaking — more tightly, and finally, finally, _finally _says, “Kihyun, will you marry me?”

The script goes out the window. The bird’s song reaches its peak. Kihyun shudders, grasps at Changkyun’s hand with both of his own, bursts into tears, and says, “_Yes!”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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	4. Months 13-16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A series of montages; publicity; meeting the family lawyer; Kihyun has things under control.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for this chapter: **graphic descriptions (but no depictions) of suicide, drug use/overdose, and violence, including gun violence. **but also, read the tags! trust me!

_MONTH 13_

Sometimes Kihyun feels like his life with Changkyun is just a series of montages. First it had been the early courtship; then it had been domesticity and youthful adventures in the concrete jungles of Manhattan and LA; and now it’s wedding planning, of all things. The night Changkyun had proposed — technically the day, considering the sun had already been rising by the time he’d popped the question — they’d stayed up, crawled back into bed to whisper to each other about the future. It’s easy to talk ambitious when you’ve just been proposed to, as it turns out, so nearly the whole thing had been planned just in those few dozy hours. Kihyun has always wanted a summer wedding, so a summer wedding they shall have. Changkyun has never liked the idea of a grandiose ceremony to which 700 people are invited, which is perfect, since they barely have five friends between the two of them, no parents or relatives to speak of. So they narrow it down to August — right on schedule — and confirm the guest list. Of course they’re still missing a venue, but at least neither one of them is interested in a theme! (To Kihyun’s immense surprise and relief, actually. He can put up with a _lot, _but enduring some kind of Gatsby or Star Wars-themed wedding is_ absolutely _out of the question.)

After individual FaceTimes with Kihyun’s friends to break the news (Wonho had literally started crying, what a prima donna), things go mainly back to normal. Kihyun doesn’t want to tell his coworkers, because they have no right to know anything about him. And yet they somehow begin to guess anyway — maybe it has something to do with the engagement ring, or the way Changkyun keeps coming over to pick him up for lunch, walking into the office even though he _really _doesn’t have to and Kihyun has made that _very _clear, and taking forever to leave once he’s walked him back in. Kihyun figures he’ll bite the bullet and start outright telling people; that way, it’ll be less of a surprise when he takes all his vacation days at once, then quits shortly afterwards. He begins, of course, with Stupid Sarah, the second-most egregious bane of his existence. 

“So what’s new with you?” she asks when she corners him by the water cooler, and if Kihyun never hears this particular variety of vocal fry ever again in his life, it’ll still be too much. God, he can’t fucking wait to get out of this place. Maybe before he kills Changkyun, he’ll practice on one of his coworkers — wouldn’t that be nice. Normally he’s not quite this murderous, but today, Stupid Sarah has matched a chartreuse blazer with a _fuchsia _necklace, and it’s giving Kihyun the mother of all headaches.

“Well,” he says, looking shifty and reticent, reluctant to drop this juicy morsel for her to peck to shreds like a starving pigeon being presented with a whole loaf of bread, “I, ah. I got engaged, actually.”

Her screech of delight is ear-rendingly intolerable, and Kihyun, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, regrets every decision he’s ever made that has brought him to this point, and allows her to see the ring. This garners the attention of several of the interns, and then a few of the creatives, and by the end of the afternoon, the whole damn office is smiling knowingly at Kihyun when he gets up to go to the copier or refill his mug of bilge water coffee. He hates it. Hates all the attention. Hates all the _solidarity. _Thank fucking Christ that he and Changkyun had mutually agreed not to broadcast their engagement on Facebook — if Kihyun had had to hear congratulations from old high school and college friends, or risk anyone from Changkyun’s larger circle of acquaintances getting a little suspicious as to the sudden presence of this conniving and sharp-cheekboned fiancé in his life, he’d have ended it all before it had even begun. 

The trouble with wanting a summer wedding after being proposed to in March is that it narrows one’s options significantly with regard to how long the engagement period can be. This is perfect for Kihyun’s purposes, of course, but he has to make it seem _natural, _has to produce some kind of angst and confusion and worry over having to pull together a whole wedding in just a few months, since neither one of them can wait until next year. They cuddle up together every night and talk about what they’ll do once they’re married, and Kihyun lifts Changkyun’s glasses up to the top of his head so they can kiss without impediment. 

They celebrate their anniversary at Per Se just for nostalgia’s sake, but don’t even make it past the third course before all their under-table hand-holding translates into a need for a more urgent kind of contact, and they pay (to be more precise, Changkyun pays and Kihyun just beams at him) for their meals, then make a quick escape. Changkyun fucks him for half an hour, gasping that Kihyun is the best thing that ever happened to him, that he’s the love of his life, and Kihyun answers, answers him so desperately, so sincerely, that even he himself is impressed by his own ability to lie. 

But the anniversary is barely a blip on Kihyun’s radar. Anniversaries are typically sentimental holidays pertaining to nostalgia and memory and mutual respect, and as such they are important only to people like Changkyun. Kihyun has very little in common with him and his saccharine ilk. He’d marked it down on his initial timeline, of course, but any preparations he could have intended on to celebrate a year of being together — a _full_ _year_, fucking hell — are entirely subsumed by the impending wedding. 

Somehow he hadn’t known that planning a wedding took this much work. It figures he would account for every single detail and yet just expect this whole entire event to fall into place on its own. And now two wolves are at war within Kihyun; one represents his pridefulness, the importance he places in appearances, the desire to have everything be classy and tasteful and perfect, spit in the face of everyone who ever doubted him, and the second is a manifestation of his logic and perspective, the knowledge that this needs to be a lower-key affair so as not to attract suspicion. He thinks there may be a way to reconcile the two, to allow both to win — it all depends on how well he manages to manipulate Changkyun in the coming weeks, and, well, he’s done a fantastic job of that for the past year. 

In the midst of planning the wedding, his _other _planning falls by the wayside. It catches him off-guard sometimes, when he remembers, when Changkyun looks particularly alive. Sometimes Changkyun forcibly reminds him, though, typically when he’s being extra sappy and corny and awful and Kihyun’s murderous instincts rise up all on their own. Sometimes he can barely stand to be around him. Sometimes Changkyun is quiet, and they can share a space without Kihyun wanting to bodily tear the heart out of the man he is going to make his husband just because he’d committed some sort of minor toothpaste transgression; sometimes they just sit and read next to each other, and Changkyun keeps Kihyun’s page for him when he gets up to refresh his glass of water. But those moments are few and far between. Mostly he’s intolerable. He studies Kihyun _so _closely, so closely that one might think Kihyun is the target here and not the other way round. And so, at the very first sign of worry creasing Kihyun’s brow, Changkyun is there, he’s hovering, he’s worried as fuck, and God, is he determined to fix whatever’s wrong.

“We don’t _have _to have a summer wedding,” he offers, Kihyun’s hands enfolded in his own. “I know that’s fast. It’s a lot to pull together so quickly.”

“But I don’t want to wait,” Kihyun argues, soft, reluctant. “I want to be married to you. I want to do it _right.”_

“We _will_ do it right,” Changkyun promises. He rubs his big, warm thumbs over the backs of Kihyun’s hands, and he’s looking at him with so much adoration, fervently devoted to him, it’s sickening. “Honestly— and tell me if you think this is a bad idea.”

Christ, here we fucking go again with Changkyun’s ideas. “Go ahead,” Kihyun says, blinking with interest.

“Well— it just makes sense, right? I’ve never been married before, you’ve never been married before, we don’t really know what we’re doing. So… why not bring in a professional?” Changkyun says. He’s so pleased with himself, too, as though he’s the first person in the whole entire world to ever think of hiring an actual wedding planner to plan a wedding. “Like, someone who does weddings for a living. We wouldn’t have to commit to anything, just get a third opinion.”

And— God, Kihyun _hates _agreeing with him, but he can’t deny that that _is _a good idea. At the very least, a wedding planner could function as a liaison between himself and the various other wedding components; the venue, the cake, the suits, the photographer. It’s not accepting _help, _per se, it’s… branching out. Exploring all his options. Kihyun has two major events to plan, after all, and if he finds someone worthy of being delegated to, he can focus on the murder and let the planner focus on the wedding itself.

“That sounds nice,” he says tentatively, and they kiss, of course, for so long. Kihyun found some old legal textbooks on unsolved murders at a used book sale, bought them for a dollar each and took them to the office, and he can’t wait to read them and get this ball _rolling. _He’s waited long enough. He’s put it off long enough, too. It’s time to work.

Changkyun’s assistant finds a wedding planner for them. They go on one of Kihyun’s lunch breaks, which he barters to be twice as long in exchange for coming in to lead a morning meeting next week. Kihyun’s head is completely elsewhere — those textbooks really did a number on him. He might have to get a gun. The kitchen knives will have to be kept very, very sharp. Changkyun isn’t as delicate as he should be; it’ll take effort to break those bones. As to the wedding, all he really cares about is that it’s classy and legally binding, with some kind of legal proceeding to link their finances happening as quickly after the names are signed as possible. The wolf of logic is winning out, and Kihyun is being as pragmatic as possible, because once they’re married, he’s allotted for another month of time, just to tie up any loose ends, cover up his own tracks, and then—

“Babe,” Changkyun says softly, his hand on Kihyun’s hip. “Do you want anything to drink?”

The wedding planner’s secretary had just offered them a selection of beverages, apparently. Kihyun blinks up from last month’s edition of Brides Magazine, having spent the past three minutes staring at the same page on color theory, and smiles, says, “Some tea would be lovely, thank you.”

“Of course,” says the secretary with an equally false smile for Kihyun in return. Kihyun can always recognize fake when he sees it, but he still resents her for not even trying to hide it. While the secretary is off making the tea, the wedding planner’s door opens and she sticks her head out, grinning widely and maternally at them.

“Come on in!” she says. “Sorry to keep y’all waiting!”

“Not at all!” Changkyun says, and Kihyun takes his hand before they stand. They’ve been waiting for eight minutes; isn’t there some sort of law against rich people having to wait for things? Kihyun’s smile is a little nervous and very radiant, making sure to crinkle up through his eyes, as he and Changkyun go into the wedding planner’s office, where she introduces herself as Moira and invites them to sit down in the fittingly mawkish armchairs she has set up for her clients. 

“First things first,” Moira says once they’re settled, smiling so beatifically that one might think she was _currently_ officiating their wedding, “congratulations!”

Changkyun dimples. Kihyun blushes. They lean into each other, hands linked tightly, and their ankles press together. “Thank you so much,” Kihyun says, as genuinely as he can muster, and Changkyun echoes, lower. “And thank you for fitting us in on such short notice.”

“Oh, it’s my pleasure,” Moira shushes, her tacky gold earrings shimmering in the warm light of her office. There is a small decorative piece of wood on her desk that says _love is love _in rainbow lettering, but most other surfaces feature carefully placed photographs from her own very heterosexual wedding. Kihyun is rapidly losing patience with this whole endeavor. “So— second things second, tell me about _you. _This _relationship. _Who _are _the two of you? Start from the beginning: how did you meet?”

Kihyun and Changkyun look at each other, and Kihyun inclines his head with a small curve of a smile to encourage Changkyun to take this question. Changkyun immediately launches into it, the café and the week of longing, then Grand Central, spilled coffee, that first date where they just couldn’t get enough of each other, like the whole world started anew. Changkyun’s hand-me-down career, Kihyun’s English degree and current stint in advertisement, living together for a few months now, engaged as of last month. What Changkyun loves about Kihyun is— everything, really, he gushes, he doesn’t even know where to start. His intelligence, maybe. His kindness. The way he cares after Changkyun. He’s too good to be true, Changkyun’s waited for him his whole life, and now he can _finally _be with him, and he couldn’t be happier. 

“Ooookay,” Moira chuckles, daubing her lower eyelids with a Kleenex from a box on the coffee table, since she’d gone misty over the course of Changkyun’s little monologue. Kihyun wonders if she cries at all her clients’ stories, or just the ones whose net worths are over a certain point. She turns to Kihyun, and her smile is so sappy, so affectedly tender. “You’re a very lucky young man, you know that?”

Oh, luck never entered into this. “Of course,” he agrees, so softly, brings their linked hands up to his mouth so he can kiss Changkyun’s knuckles. “This year has been the best year of my life. Ever since the day we met, I’ve felt like… I was waiting for him, too, without even knowing he existed, and now he’s _here, _and I get to have him, _forever,_ and it’s just… I can’t even believe how happy I am sometimes.”

Now Changkyun is also getting misty, and Kihyun smiles at him, making sure that his eyes are nice and tender. It’s not a total lie, for once; Kihyun really was waiting for someone to come along and alleviate the burden of Kihyun’s modern existence. What’s truly unbelievable is that Kihyun will get to have his cake and eat it, too, because he gets the wedding, the lifestyle, and then — after a staged home invasion or a freak accident involving a blender or some as-yet undiscovered allergy to bees — he gets the glorious solitude, resting on his laurels forevermore, free to live however he pleases. Shit, it’s all going to have to happen pretty fast. He hadn’t realized how fast things were moving, but if they get married at the end of summer, then that leaves only five months for him to account for every detail, every variable, every possible facet that could point to Kihyun as the cause of death, how can he do this without getting his hands dirty, how can he make a clean break of it but ensure that once Changkyun is gone he doesn’t come back, how can—

“I think Kihyun has given that some thought, actually,” Changkyun says, and hearing his own name in Changkyun’s voice is enough to pull Kihyun out of his head and sit up straighter, trying to pick up the conversational thread he’d dropped. He looks at Changkyun for a moment, lost, and Changkyun must be able to tell that Kihyun had gone elsewhere, because his lips purse for just a moment in a little smile, and he adds, “You told me you were looking at wedding venues, right?”

“Oh, yes,” Kihyun says, back in the game. “More so what I’m not interested in than what I _am _interested in, though.” A polite titter of laughter from himself and Moira both, and Moira opens her iPad to start taking notes.

“How many guests were we thinking? Ballpark,” she says. “I’m asking so we can be sure we’re finding something that fits.”

Kihyun hates her attempts at camaraderie; there is no _we _here, only us and you. “I think… very small,” he says, and Changkyun nods to agree. “Fewer than ten.”

“How intimate,” Moira smiles. “That’ll certainly make booking a place easier than, say, if you wanted a big blowout wedding for 500.”

“God, no,” Kihyun laughs, lightly thumbing over the side of Changkyun’s hand. “No, just our closest friends.”

Moira nods, writing something down. “Indoor, outdoor?”

It really is a shame about the poisons. Kihyun wishes he’d done this two centuries ago, then he could have just used arsenic like everyone else. “Outdoor, weather permitting, and since we’re aiming for summer—”

“Oh, you are?” Moira says. Kihyun cannot abide being interrupted and his grip inadvertently tightens on Changkyun’s. “Well, it’s already April.”

“Yes,” Kihyun says, being as patient and polite as he can. “That’s why we needed to see you sooner rather than later, as we know there’s not much time.”

“At least you don’t have to wait for a custom wedding gown to come in,” Moira says, evidently trying for some sort of silver-lining joke, and Changkyun laughs at it, because of course he does. “We can make that work, of course. It’ll just depend on the venue availability, is the only issue.”

“We were thinking August,” Changkyun says. Oh, so _now_ he remembers that he can speak, that he should be a part of this process, too? If Kihyun flips him over onto his front and pushes him face-down in a pillow, will the coroner attribute it to autoerotic asphyxiation or something else? Kihyun will have to be careful to hold him gently, so his fingers don’t bruise his easily-marked skin. “Is that enough time, do you think?”

“It really will depend on the venue,” Moira says apologetically. “And such short notice _does _limit your options a teeny little bit, but I’m sure we’ll be able to find a place for the two of you. But we can be realistic, alright?” She’s trying to be optimistic, but it’s clear that she thinks their odds aren’t good, and is probably mentally relegating their wedding to next summer, but even Kihyun’s angelic patience has a limit. Next to him, Changkyun shifts slightly in his chair, and Kihyun brings his other hand over to rest on his forearm. “What’s more important to you, the venue or August?”

Changkyun looks to Kihyun for guidance. Kihyun likes that. “Both,” he replies, still lightly, with an incredulous little smile. “The whole package is what’s important. I don’t think we’d be willing to compromise on anything.”

“…Since we don’t have to,” Changkyun completes, his thumb pressing warm into the tendons of Kihyun’s wrist. “Money is no object. If we have to pay more to get priority booking at the perfect location, that’s fine by us.” Kihyun _very _much likes that, hearing Changkyun’s money talked about in terms of the _us_, and he smiles at him, grateful that he’d spoken up.

“I was just about to ask about budget, actually,” Moira says, and Kihyun fights to keep his lip from curling in distaste at her naked greed. “Again, ballpark, we can discuss more specifically once we get quotes from a venue—”

“No budget,” Changkyun says. Music to Kihyun’s ears. He stays neutral once again, not betraying too much happiness or gratitude, nothing disproportionate. He should be used to this by now, after all.

“Okay,” Moira chuckles, writing that down. “Alright, then. I guess the world is your oyster. Are we thinking local, or destination?”

“If we wanted to stay in the country, my family has a lakehouse,” Changkyun suggests. “That’s…” And he goes all shy, dimples carved deep into his cheeks, dark eyelashes skimming low. “That’s where I proposed, actually.”

“How romantic,” Moira coos while Kihyun breathes through his revulsion. How pathetic, how degrading, to get married at the _family fucking lakehouse, _like some kind of backyard barefoot hoe-down. No. God, he doesn’t know why he’s so tense, he’d been so relaxed going into this, but now it’s really hitting him that there’s less than half a year until he has to snuff Changkyun out like a votive candle swimming in its own wax, and he’s barely got a plan in place, he’s had a fucking year to hammer out the details and he still doesn’t even have a murder weapon picked out—

“Oh,” Changkyun says in response to another pronouncement by Moira, another one Kihyun had tuned out. He’s using a _tone, _one of his most sentimental, and when he looks at Kihyun, his eyes are shining. “Oh, baby, there’s a wedding venue in Grand Central, did you know that?”

Kihyun can’t help it, he snorts a disdainful laugh. “And get married surrounded by sticky, sweaty strangers? You’re the one who’s always saying how _700,000 people _pass through every single day. No, thank you.” 

“Okay, so not Grand Central,” Moira summarizes while Kihyun abruptly realizes that had been too much, too far, and reels himself back in, smiling more sheepishly at Changkyun, whose responding smile is somehow no less adoring than usual. 

Before Moira can say anything else, and before Kihyun can dig himself any deeper, there is a knock on the door and the secretary finally brings in their tea, a full, what, ten minutes after initially offering? God, the service in this place. There’s some negotiating with the sugar, but finally everyone gets settled down, and Kihyun doesn’t trust himself not to fly off the handle again without Changkyun holding onto him, but he’s an adult, he’s great in professional situations, and he _does _have plenty of ideas for their wedding colors, actually, thank you very much. 

“So let’s talk destination, then,” Moira says, twirling her iPad stylus before jotting something down. “Tropical, historical?”

“Definitely not tropical,” Changkyun says and glances at Kihyun to confirm. Kihyun inclines his head in a small nod, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, the one Changkyun likes to kiss. “Neither of us are really… beachy people.”

“No beaches, okay,” Moira agrees. “What continent, then? Asia, Europe?”

“Europe,” Kihyun says after a brief pause, and he sees Changkyun nod along.

Moira hums, types a few letters — surely she’s not searching for a list of countries in Europe. Kihyun stifles a laugh in his tea. “England?” 

“Too rainy,” Kihyun says. 

“Italy?”

“Too Italian.”

“France?”

“Too—” Actually. That’s not a bad idea. He looks at Changkyun, and Changkyun looks at him, and then they both look at Moira, heads turning in unison. “France could work.”

“Wonderful! Let me just go get my file,” Moira says, setting her iPad down and standing up to go over to her desk, and Changkyun delicately places his cup of tea on the table and leans in closer to Kihyun.

“I think France sounds great,” he whispers. “Wanna get married in Versailles?”

Kihyun gives him a chastising look, and at this point, he can’t even tell if he’s joking. “Same deal as Grand Central. Too many tourists.”

“I could book the Hall of Mirrors for you,” Changkyun offers, his voice so low, and he’s being _serious, _he’d do that, if Kihyun wanted him to. Kihyun goes all shivery and pushes at Changkyun’s shoulder, a smile fighting its way onto his face despite Kihyun’s best efforts to keep it down. “Hm? You want to?”

“No,” Kihyun says, and kisses him on the cheek. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Sorry,” Changkyun says, not sounding sorry at all, and Kihyun hates showing him affection in front of strangers but he nudges his nose against Changkyun’s cheekbone before pulling away. Changkyun doesn’t pick his tea back up, just takes Kihyun’s hand in his own instead. He’s pleased with himself for getting Kihyun flustered, and he still has a smile playing on his lips when Moira returns to her chair with three stuffed-full binders to show them. 

“So just in Paris, we have a _whole _range of options,” she begins, and Kihyun and Changkyun scoot their chairs closer to the table so they can see better. She flips past all the churches, which is awfully presumptuous of her, and then starts showing them all manner of locations; refurbished warehouses, private salons, luxury ballrooms, secular rooftop chapels. But they’re all too in the city, too densely surrounded by curious eyes. Too many people to take Changkyun away, to intervene when they see how tightly Kihyun has him chained. Kihyun doesn’t want anybody knowing his business. He reminds Moira that they’d like an _intimate_ wedding, and when she opens up a binder with more rural, non-Paris locations, he feels much more at ease, and it doesn’t matter at all what Changkyun thinks, but he seems pleased with this shift in concept, too, sitting closer to Kihyun, asking more questions, expressing a fondness for the south of France, the clear mountain air by the Pyrenees. 

They’re looking at châteaus now; how wonderful, to be married in their very own castle. They can then honeymoon in France as well, if Kihyun can get Changkyun to manipulate his boss into giving him more time off. Kihyun had toyed, momentarily, with the concept of skipping the honeymoon altogether, but he’s discovering that he likes being spoiled, so he may as well milk this for all it’s worth until it comes to an abrupt halt. Yes, he’ll have to get a gun. With a silencer. He’ll need an alibi — a conference for work, something to place him at a hotel eighty miles away, and credit card purchases to confirm his presence there — he can take a Greyhound bus back to Manhattan the night of, break in — but the doorman — but the downstairs neighbors, but the building across the street with its lights always on — Manhattan is the densest-populated area in the continental United States, there are too many fucking people, fucking everywhere, Kihyun is surrounded, surrounded by liabilities, witnesses, cameras, wandering eyes, surveillance — New York City is the fucking Panopticon, and if Kihyun is going to pull this off, they need to get _out. _

“I like the look of this one,” Changkyun says, frowning, leaning over the glossy pages to examine the finer details. “Is there supposed to be a _Say Yes to the Dress _moment? We see it, and we know?”

“Some people have it,” Moira shrugs, smiling. “How do you feel when you look at these photos?”

“I feel… great,” Changkyun replies after a moment. “May I?” Moira nods, and Changkyun takes the binder for himself, placing it across his and Kihyun’s knees. “What do you think, Kihyun?”

Fuck, Kihyun keeps forgetting himself. He’s composed again near-instantly, bowing his head to look at the photographs of the exterior, interior, and grounds of the château. “Oh,” he breathes. “Oh, that’s really lovely.”

“You don’t have to commit to it right away,” Moira adds. “Feel free to take a few days to mull it over.”

But Kihyun won’t need a few days. It’s perfect. Isolated and absolutely private, one road in and out, beautiful red brick with white detailing, turrets, balconies, a _pool, _meticulously maintained topiaries, enormous well-lit rooms with cream-white walls, high arched ceilings, intricate wooden details, antique furniture, that master suite is _mouthwatering_. “This is the one,” he says. There’s a mirror opposite the ludicrously large bed, and no fewer than three grand staircases. Both wolves win, but no one wins bigger than Kihyun himself. It’s perfect.

“I think so, too,” Changkyun says, and his fingers curl around Kihyun’s. “It’s right. It feels right.”

“Well! That was easy!” Moira laughs, and clasps her hands together in delight as Changkyun leans in to kiss Kihyun once, small and sweet, just to seal the deal. “I’ll reach out to on-site management and we’ll, uh, _liaison.”_

_“Bien sûr,” _Changkyun says, which comes completely out of nowhere and leaves Kihyun more than a little bit winded, but he doesn’t let it show, just sits up straighter, smiling bright and dazzling at Changkyun and at Moira.

“Then they’ll let me know what dates they have available, or we’ll work something out,” Moira continues, smiling knowingly at them, “and we can begin to book accommodations and travel for you and your guests. I typically recommend sending save-the-date mailings around a year in advance for destination weddings, but I think we’re better off sending those as soon as possible, yes? I’ll have our graphic designers mock some options up for you. As to the invitations—”

Kihyun tunes her out while she rambles. Changkyun’s assistants and secretaries can take care of all the finer details. They have a venue; they’ll be safe and alone, and Kihyun will have Changkyun all to himself, to do whatever he wants with.

With the venue picked, they decide to wrap the meeting up there for now. Moira hugs them both, and of course she reeks of J’Adore by Dior, making Kihyun have to stifle several sneezes as they get shown out of the office with multiple promises to stay in touch, to keep this momentum going, to get everything booked and settled and confirmed by the end of the month. Changkyun, by Kihyun’s side, is buzzing with excitement, fidgety and joyous and out of breath, and Kihyun smiles at him when they’re waiting for the elevator, leans in to speak right against his ear.

“I’ve been thinking,” he murmurs, and Changkyun hums to encourage him to keep talking, suddenly so still when before he’d been so restless. Kihyun brushes his lips over Changkyun’s earlobe, presses a small kiss to his soft skin, and his hand starts to snake under Changkyun’s shirt. “That when we come back from our honeymoon, I want us to have a _home _to come back to. A house. A real one. Just for us. Don’t you think that’d be nice?”

Changkyun turns his head to catch Kihyun’s mouth in a real kiss, and Kihyun kisses him back, basking in the warmth of the knowledge that from this point on, everything he wants, he gets; from this point on, he _wins._

_MONTH 14_

Things are different now that they’re engaged. He’d had to put in so much work before, and although now there’s _less_ upkeep, there’s still _some _upkeep, and it’s of a different variety, a different flavor. Being engaged is different. Being married will be different, still, even though it won’t be for long. Kihyun rereads _Gone Girl. _Puts out tentative feelers with his boss to see how much time he’d be able to get for the wedding and honeymoon; the answer he gets is disappointing, and he complains into Changkyun’s shoulder for a whole evening while Changkyun takes on the soothing role for a change, warm thumbs rubbing at Kihyun’s tight temples, promising that he’ll figure something out, he knows Kihyun loves his job — ha — but he shouldn’t have to compromise here, either, since he doesn’t have to, just like with the wedding itself. Kihyun lets Changkyun kiss him and tuck him into bed, and, nestled against Changkyun’s chest, he scrolls through the photographs Moira had emailed them of their wedding venue. It really doesn’t get any more perfect than this. Everything is going exactly according to plan. Kihyun kisses the curve of Changkyun’s neck where he’s soft, no stubble, and as he falls asleep, his head is full of numbers — five months, to be exact, the amount of time keeping him and his fortune apart. 

They meet for lunch in Central Park. Changkyun, unwrapping expensive sandwiches, moves closer to him on the picnic blanket he’d brought along from the apartment — he hasn’t been to the office in weeks, maybe longer. Kihyun truly cannot imagine what he does all day. They’re drinking rose lemonade from glass bottles, cuddled close with Kihyun sitting up and Changkyun leaned back on his elbows, and as they clink the necks of the bottles together, then take sips, Changkyun looks out over the park and sees a woman lifting her phone, likely to snap a photo of the two of them. She’s been watching them for a while — Kihyun had noticed her the second she’d walked past — but seems to mean no harm, but Changkyun, testy today for some reason, frowns. 

“Phones,” he says darkly. “Being in the public eye. Everyone thinks they can know everyone else’s business— has she never seen a gay couple before or something?”

Kihyun makes a small, soothing noise, presses rose-flavored lips to Changkyun’s head. “I think we just make a pretty picture,” he murmurs, slipping his arm around his tense shoulders. “Don’t you think?”

Changkyun lifts his chin up to see him. “We do look good together,” he admits, gentler. How funny — Kihyun, in all his relationships and friendships, has always been the one to strike, quick to cutting anger, and others have needed to hold him back, but here he is, soft, mollifying, tender. 

“Are you okay?” Kihyun asks. Changkyun likes being touched on the back of his head, so Kihyun sets his sandwich down and moves closer to him, pulls Changkyun half into his lap. “Did something happen?”

“It’s work,” Changkyun says, a little reluctant, after a moment. “Obviously Emma and Susanne know we’re getting married, but I’m going to have to tell the rest of the board soon so I can get approval to use both jets to get everyone to France, and then they’ll probably want me to make some kind of announcement, they might even throw us an _engagement party_— ugh.”

Would that truly be so bad? Kihyun is somewhat offended that Changkyun doesn’t want to show him off. “Oh,” he says, and pets his ever-cool fingers through Changkyun’s thick hair. “Can’t they just leave you alone? You’ve done so much for them already.”

“Right?” Changkyun mumbles. In Kihyun’s lap, he’s comfortable enough to close his eyes, lie back and relax, and Kihyun watches his pulse beating under his skin. He’d missed a spot while shaving — dark shadow just below his jaw. Kihyun stares at the life in him and counts down the days to when he’s dead. He doesn’t know how he’s going to be able to wait. But looking at the undeniable blood pumping through Changkyun’s body makes him queasy — if there’s anything _Gone Girl _has done for him, it’s made him strike out the idea of a stabbing — and he looks away and up to find that Changkyun’s eyes are open again and he’s watching Kihyun, too.

“It’s not that I don’t want to show you off,” Changkyun says, slow. “I’d shout it from every rooftop, you know me.”

Kihyun bites back a smile. “I do know you.”

“I just want to do it on _my _terms,” Changkyun insists. He’s getting whiny — this could take a while, but Kihyun doesn’t have that much time left in his lunch hour. How can he rush this along? He starts by handing Changkyun his sandwich to shut him up, keep his mouth busy. Changkyun takes a bite, chews thoughtfully, and starts talking again with his mouth full — one of his absolute worst habits. Kihyun clears his throat in distaste and looks out over the park while Changkyun continues, “I’m almost tempted to— not tell them directly at first. Let them find out on their own. Who are they to tell me what to do, right?”

Kihyun has no idea where Changkyun’s animosity for the board of directors comes from; for a team of glorified nannies, they’re extraordinarily hands-off, and he’s perfectly free to go anywhere he likes, spend any amount of money, vanish for months on end, without so much as a peep from the rest of the board. All part of Changkyun’s various victim complexes, of course, where he’s everyone’s punching bag, when really nobody touches him, nobody minds him, nobody at all, until Kihyun. “Exactly,” he agrees. “How would they find out in the first place, though?”

“I could beat them to the punch,” Changkyun says. All of a sudden, Kihyun knows what Changkyun is going to say next, and his heart quite literally skips a beat, every part of him trembles, and his hand goes tight in Changkyun’s hair for just a moment. Changkyun, oblivious, thinks this was his idea all along. _God,_ Kihyun is good. “We could do an engagement announcement in the Times. I’m talking full photo profile, interview, the whole nine yards. You know I hate doing interviews, but I’d do it for you, for us, if you wanted. What do you think?”

“Oh, my,” Kihyun says, ready to vibrate out of his skin. The New York Times. Kihyun will be in the New York fucking Times. His picture, his story, his life. His parents will see it — it doesn’t matter. _Everyone _will see it. Everyone will know that he made it; everyone will know that he is loved and provided for, cared for, untouchable. He’s going to be in the New York Times like a successful writer, like a brilliant reporter, like a celebrity, like _royalty. _The fact that Changkyun will necessarily also be in the Times with him is a minor annoyance at worst; what matters is that Kihyun’s face will be on those sacred pages. He’ll buy out every newsstand in the city to make sure he has enough copies. Life is so fucking good.

“You want to?” Changkyun prompts. Oh, right, he’s still there, he wants an answer. Kihyun swallows, beams down at him, leans down for a small kiss.

“That sounds like a great idea,” he breathes. “We can get the article framed and put it up in our new house.” 

Changkyun nods, pushing higher in Kihyun’s lap to kiss him deeper. “Emma found us a realtor, by the way,” he says, and Kihyun is so surprised that things are actually coming along with that, that Changkyun had actually taken him seriously, that they’re really going to get a house, one that Kihyun will pick out and decorate and make his own to live in forevermore, and kisses him again, helping Changkyun sit up. In the past few weeks, he’s come around more to Changkyun’s assistant; Emma is smart, capable, and entirely uninterested in Changkyun as anything beyond her hapless boss. She gets the job done when Changkyun is incapable, as is so often the case, and Kihyun usually appreciates what she does for them. But realtors are a tricky breed — just like wedding planners — Kihyun will _not _consent to being shown around decrepit ancestral mansions by a woman with a ‘can I speak to the manager?’ haircut insisting that they can turn this room into a nursery when the time comes. He doesn’t know if he can trust Emma’s taste, since he certainly can’t trust Changkyun’s. 

“Really? I keep meaning to send her a thank-you card for everything she does,” he smiles. “When can we start looking at properties?”

“Whenever you want,” Changkyun assures him. “We could even go today, if you had time.”

“I have to go back to work eventually,” Kihyun reminds, but that sounds less and less convincing with each repetition, and he finds himself saying that specific phrase a lot. Changkyun pouts at him, sits up so they’ll be next to each other again. “But maybe we can go this weekend. I know it’s still early, but I’d love to get started, see the state of the market.”

“Of course,” Changkyun says. “And we can look online tonight a little bit, too. Figure out what we want and what we don’t want. Is having a pool important to you?”

“No,” Kihyun laughs, and Changkyun nods solemnly.

“Well, there we go. A starting point. And you know I’ll like whatever you like, so if you want to look on your own, then go ahead,” he says. “Just keep me posted.”

How sweet, giving permission for what Kihyun was going to do unbidden already. Kihyun smiles at him, takes another bite of his sandwich. “Can we work on the invitations when I’m done with work, too?”

“The cardstock samples just came in,” Changkyun nods. 

“And I’ve been practicing my calligraphy,” Kihyun hums, nudging their shoulders together. 

Changkyun always looks at him like Kihyun has reinvented the wheel. For the smallest things, he looks at him like he’s never seen anything so amazing. Did he really think Kihyun would let some random graphic designer, a _stranger, _design their wedding invitations? Or is he truly that impressed by Kihyun’s ability to wield a fountain pen? Honestly, he’s just simple-minded, easily entertained, even more easily swayed. They kiss, unsurprisingly. Lately they’ve been kissing so much more — on the weekends, hours go by with them all entangled on the couch or on the floor, kissing with no real purpose or goal, just making out for its own sake, easy and close. Luckily, they can’t do that in public, so Kihyun is released after a two-second smooch, smiling since Changkyun is still so near. “Do you have to go back to work soon?” Changkyun asks. 

Kihyun checks his watch — a spontaneous gift from Changkyun, white gold detailing on the face. “Depends,” he says, taking another sip of rose lemonade.

“On what?” Changkyun says, still watching him as though Kihyun is doing something incredible, his eyes are so desperate, so plaintive, so astonished. Kihyun has to look away, out across the park again, his smile widening.

“On if I get a better offer,” he replies. God knows he doesn’t _want _to stay out with Changkyun longer than he has to, but he has to at least _try_ to make it seem convincing. That’s how he knows things are truly bleak — before, he hadn’t been able to decide which was worse, but now it’s indubitable that he’d rather be at work than with Changkyun. But he can’t regret anything, not now, he’s in too deep. Only a few more months. He smiles at Changkyun, coy, and Changkyun takes the cold bottle of lemonade out of his hand, sets it down carefully on the picnic blanket.

“I think I can make it worth your while,” he says, leaning in for a kiss, and he tastes cold and sweet, pressing closer to Kihyun on the blanket, damn the watching eyes, forget everyone else who isn’t them. 

Ah, fuck it. Kihyun slings his arms around Changkyun’s shoulders, cradles the back of his head in his palms, kisses him deep, thinks about all the work he has to do when he gets back to the office. Allows Changkyun to make him late.

_MONTH 15_

“God, are you a… what’s the auditory version of ‘sight for sore eyes?’ Is that a thing?” Kihyun says, pinching the bridge of his nose with his index finger and thumb and rubbing until the throb in his head decreases.

“You can just say you missed me, it’s faster,” Minhyuk says, and Kihyun, used to him by now, pulls the phone away from his ear to keep from being deafened when he cackles a laugh. “What’s up, buttercup? You at work?”

“Yeah, taking a break,” Kihyun says. He’s standing in the alley behind his office building, a cigarette in his other hand. He doesn’t usually smoke — doesn’t like it — hates the smell and the taste and the way it makes him feel dependent on something — but if he doesn’t get _some _kind of psychological relief from the torture of his everyday existence, he really is going to lose it. That’s how bad things are, but he has to restrain himself to one a day, early in the morning, so Changkyun doesn’t smell anything on his clothes and ask him any fucking questions. God, that man asks so many questions. Doesn’t he get tired of hearing Kihyun’s voice? “Wanted someone to keep me company.”

“So call your fiancé,” Minhyuk smirks. “Isn’t that what he’s for?”

Kihyun can’t hold back — he scoffs with all the disdain he feels, undisguised, free. Of all his friends, Minhyuk is the one most likely to understand and commiserate with his plight; sure, he liked Changkyun when they met, but he’s loyal only to himself, and there will be no love lost, nothing for him to defend once Kihyun starts to vent. “God, no.”

“Oh?” Minhyuk says with interest. “What’d he do?”

If only it were something he’d done, not everything he _is. _Kihyun can’t get away from him. Not even at work, not anymore. Changkyun came to visit him one too many times, left a cardigan behind for Kihyun to wear if he gets cold, and now he’s permeating Kihyun’s whole cubicle, the faintest breath of his cologne at the most unexpected times, flower deliveries at least once weekly, a framed picture of them front and center on Kihyun’s desk. It feels so real, nobody suspects a damn thing, and it’s abhorrent, how easily everyone just believes that this is what Kihyun wants, that it’s what he needs. Kihyun has no castle. No tower of solitude. Changkyun is everywhere, even _here, _Kihyun hadn’t even _meant _to talk about Changkyun right now, he’d honestly just called Minhyuk to see how he was doing, but he couldn’t even help himself — and after all, it seems Kihyun is the one getting poisoned, not the other way around. “Nothing in particular,” he mutters. “It’s just— everything about him.”

“I got the invite,” Minhyuk says, and makes a noise like he’s snapping some gum. “Real cute.”

“_Cute?” _Kihyun repeats, affronted. “I _hand-wrote _those— the paper itself cost $50 a page! All expenses paid to Saint-Lizier for a week, and all you can say is that it’s _real cute?” _

“Stand down, soldier. Yeah, it was cute, you did a good job. You expect me to show some genuine emotion to you right now? About you getting _married? _You know I need at _least _three to five business days’ advance warning before I can be emotionally candid with you, bub.” Minhyuk snaps his gum again and clicks a pen, but somehow, Kihyun feels better already. Minhyuk’s brand of annoying is so different from Changkyun’s, and it’s exactly what Kihyun has been needing.

“Did you at least fill out the RSVP?” Kihyun asks, kicking a pebble across the alleyway and giving up on his cigarette only halfway through, tossing it to the ground and scuffing it out with the heel of his expensive, Changkyun-purchased loafers. 

Minhyuk hums in assent. “Walked all the way to the post office myself to send it. Feel special yet?”

“Definitely,” Kihyun snorts. He’s about to shake thoughts of Changkyun right out of his head, just banter with Minhyuk like he always does, ask him about work and Hyungwon’s latest adventures, but then Minhyuk says—

“So there’s trouble in paradise, hmmm?”

“Ugh,” Kihyun says. “Ugh. God, he’s driving me up the wall.”

“Go on,” Minhyuk encourages.

Where is Kihyun even supposed to start? “He’s just— he’s ridiculous,” he says, teeth gritting for a moment. He can feel the floodgates straining, but he can’t unload too much or Minhyuk will gossip or worry, and yes, Kihyun needs to vent, but he needs his plan to work even more. “So pretentious, like, he’s always trying to impress me? Which I’ve _told _him isn’t necessary, but he does it anyway, he’s such a try-hard. And so trusting. He just promoted his assistant to VP of communications just because she has a good sob story— she’s smart, but she’s not qualified for that, and now it’s just him and his ancient secretary, and _she’s _shit at her job, too, but he’ll never fire her because he’s met her grand-nephew, and— well, fuck, it’s not like it matters, anyway, he never goes to the office anymore, _ever_, just sits at our apartment waiting for me to come home so he can complain about how bored he is and kiss all my lip balm off.”

“Oho,” says Minhyuk.

Kihyun barrels onwards. “And the way he spends his money… God, get me in a room with his accountant, I’m sure we’d have a lot to say to each other. He’s such a— a _louche_— he buys all this shit he doesn’t need, all this shit _I _don’t need either, and usually, all of it’s for me, which… I didn’t ask for it! There’s plenty that we _do _need, but he doesn’t get that, no—”

“He got you that camera for Christmas, right?”

“Yes,” Kihyun says, cheeks unexpectedly flushing, but he continues regardless, now that he’s started he can’t stop, after more than a year of playing house it’s so _good _to get this out, be bitter, be himself, at long last. “Part of the problem, right? I barely use it. I don’t even know how much it cost. But that’s just what he’s like, he just does whatever feels good without thinking twice about it. He’s so irresponsible, like a little kid, and he’s so bad at being an adult— if his bills weren’t on autopay, I don’t think he’d ever remember he needed to pay them, it’s ridiculous. _He’s _ridiculous.”

Kihyun realizes he’s been talking nonstop for quite a while, stops, takes a few deep breaths. Even Minhyuk’s silence sounds amused. Did Kihyun go too far? It’s too late to take it back, but he might be able to laugh it off. That was so what he needed, though, better than any nicotine, and he could talk for hours about everything Changkyun does that grates on him, but that was good, for a start. That was what he needed. Minhyuk, ever-eager for an excuse to hate Kihyun’s boyfriends, will doubtless appreciate it, once he stops silently laughing at hearing Kihyun so worked up.

That’s why it comes harsher than a slap across the face when Minhyuk drawls, “So you _do _really love him.”

“What?” Kihyun says, flabbergasted, then quickly— “I mean, yeah, God, of course I do. What’s that supposed to mean?”

He can hear Minhyuk’s shrug, no doubt because he’s wearing a shirt made out of a very crinkly material. “Well, you know. I saw you two together, and you guys are a super cute couple, but you don’t usually _go _for cuteness, right? Lowkey, I was worried you were rushing into something that wasn’t a right fit. But you don’t talk that way about people you don’t love.”

“Oh,” Kihyun says. No, that’s not what he meant. That’s not what Minhyuk was supposed to get out of this. He doesn’t know how Minhyuk could possibly have interpreted everything he’d said quite so incorrectly, and he’s tongue-tied and frowning, watching the embers of his cigarette blow down the alleyway, moved by the breeze. 

“I’m happy for you,” Minhyuk says. “You’re pissed at him right now, but I really think he might be the one to tame the shrew.”

“He’d better be,” Kihyun says, muttering on autopilot. “I’m marrying him, aren’t I? He’d better be the one.”

“Just talk to his accountant, see if the things you think are problems are even really problems at all. Isn’t he super loaded?” Minhyuk says, and Kihyun wants to laugh but holds it back. He’d wanted some solidarity — he’d wanted a friend, and now he feels more alone than ever, because Minhyuk doesn’t understand, he never will, nobody can ever know. Changkyun, this whole entire plan, it’s Kihyun’s cross to bear; his, and his alone. 

“I don’t really want advice,” Kihyun says. “It’ll be fine. You’re right, I do love him.”

“He took you to LA on a whim and you’re getting married in France, I mean, _fuck, _get me some ‘ridiculous’ like that,” Minhyuk sighs. “Or let me have a slice of the pie, if you don’t want it.”

“_No,”_ Kihyun says immediately, vehemently, too harshly, and reels himself back in. “No. Get your own.”

Minhyuk has long since learned to ignore Kihyun’s outbursts of temper, and as such, he thankfully barely notices this one, and thank God, too, because that one Kihyun wouldn’t even be able to explain if pressed. “Ooh, did I tell you I went on a Tinder date last week?”

“Uh, no,” Kihyun says. All riled up with nowhere to go, no one to turn to, and he feels his phone buzz in his hand and he just knows it’s Changkyun asking where he wants to go for lunch, and it’s all he can do to keep from screaming. “How’d it go?”

“So the first red flag was when he said he lives in a _split-level _house,” Minhyuk begins. Kihyun makes an appropriately disgusted noise to encourage him to continue, but he’s not really listening while Minhyuk talks, he’s trying to calm himself back down, since even though Minhyuk wasn’t much of a receptive audience, it was still a relief to get that off his chest.

“I should go back to work,” Kihyun says a couple of minutes later, cutting Minhyuk off mid-sentence. “Text me the rest, though, okay? I’ll drive to Albany and snitch to his aunt, if you need me to.”

“Don’t make promises you won’t keep,” Minhyuk warns. 

God, Kihyun is trying. “Well, good luck,” he says, meaning with the Tinder guy.

“You, too,” Minhyuk replies.

Kihyun raises his eyebrows. “With what?” But Minhyuk has already hung up. So Kihyun goes back to work, back to his desk, and it’s Friday, but he can’t even look forward to the weekend anymore — there’s nothing that Changkyun has left unspoiled in his life. He’s everywhere. Whatever house they pick out, Kihyun is determined to at least have his own wing, a minimum of two rooms to himself. Straight men have bachelor pads, man-caves, to keep from snapping and murdering their wives, and Kihyun is going to need a sanity wing, to keep him from snapping and murdering his husband too soon, before he can have his perfect crime all figured out. 

The realtor Changkyun’s assistant found for them had sent over a dozen options, more than half of which Kihyun rejected near-instantly. Changkyun had seemed to have no opinion whatsoever, nestled comfortably against Kihyun’s side and watching as he wrinkled his nose and closed the Zillow tabs, each one more decisively than the last. But finally, Kihyun had settled on three properties that seemed immediately interesting, and two more that were passable. They’re seeing the first batch this weekend; never mind that they won’t be moving in until August at the very earliest. Changkyun can afford to buy the whole damn thing in a lump sum, fuck a mortgage, and Kihyun could kiss him when he says that after Kihyun had voiced a faint concern about double-paying for this apartment and the new place. So he does kiss him, and they’re meeting Jacqueline in the morning, in Irvington. Kihyun has never worked with a realtor for himself before, so he’s already planning how to behave, how to conceal his nerves, but he watched a lot of _House Hunters _and _Million Dollar Listing _when he was in college, so he thinks he just might be able to fake it until he makes it, just like he’s been doing for the past year. He can do it. Changkyun will make a bigger fool of himself, anyway, even if it’s just to help Kihyun save face. It’ll be fine.

Changkyun waking up before Kihyun is exceedingly rare. This is because Kihyun is the one with the desk job and, therefore, with the daily alarm. Changkyun sleeps through it most days and only begins to stir by the time Kihyun is finished checking the news on his phone and is getting up to wash his face with Changkyun’s expensive skincare products. But today, Kihyun, worn out after an emotionally tiring Friday, still has his cheek pressed deep into the pillow when Changkyun’s first alarm sounds, and he knows they have places to be but he refuses to lift his head or move. Let Changkyun deal with breakfast for once. Or maybe they can just pick something up on the way. He feels a light touch on his back, between his shoulderblades, and groans softly into the sheets, refusing to acknowledge him any further than that.

“Good morning,” Changkyun murmurs, so low, and he’s smiling, Kihyun can feel it without needing to see it. “Are you awake?”

“No,” Kihyun breathes.

Changkyun moves closer. He puts his arm around Kihyun, slides right up to him, presses the faintest of kisses to the back of Kihyun’s neck. “What time are we meant to be meeting Jacqueline?”

He must have been awake for a few minutes before the alarm, even. Maybe a bad dream. He has those, sometimes, and rolls around restless and overheated in his sheets, until Kihyun attaches himself closer to his warm body, pulls his troubled head into his own angular shoulder, gives him a quiet, quiet place to rest. He’s not overheated now, though, and he’s not an unpleasant presence behind Kihyun, and Kihyun almost forgets the question he’d asked, thoughts slipping but not sticking through his barely-conscious mind, until he feels the nudge of Changkyun’s nose at his hairline and remembers. “Mmm… ten.”

“And it’s a half-hour drive,” Changkyun says. “Tell me something else. Where are we going?”

Something else? Why could he possibly want Kihyun to tell him things he already knows? Kihyun closes his eyes tighter, his irritated breath more like a whine. “We’re… starting in Irvington, then… I think White Plains, then Scarsdale… Changkyun, give me five more minutes.”

“Sorry,” Changkyun whispers. “You just sound so beautiful in the mornings. Extra mellifluous.”

Kihyun’s face, hidden still in his pillow, goes warm, and he curls in on himself, shying away from Changkyun. Not awake enough to hide his reaction, barely awake enough to hide himself. “What?”

“Me-lli-flu-ous,” Changkyun repeats, his fingers tapping out each syllable on the ridges of Kihyun’s spine. “Your voice. I could listen to you talk for hours.”

“Don’t be silly,” Kihyun mumbles, and now he’s so aware of the rhythms of his own speech, pitching higher so he doesn’t have to talk loud. He can’t stop blushing, and he’s getting less and less asleep with each passing second. Changkyun picks the worst possible times to be sincere. And his touch is too light, making Kihyun itchy, and Kihyun shivers, lifting his head just enough to talk unmuffled. “Come closer. You’re tickling me.”

Changkyun seals himself in close, Kihyun enfolded in his arms, in his body. Normally, Kihyun is glad for the morning respite, doesn’t like being squished and pinned and constricted when he’s not even conscious enough to either hate or enjoy it, but he’s in a giving mood after Changkyun’s compliment, and lets Changkyun coddle him and croon good morning in his ear again and smooth his warm, familiar palm up Kihyun’s side. It still tickles, and Kihyun twitches, but melts back into the heat of Changkyun’s body. Has a flash of a memory, nearly a year ago, Changkyun saying he loves the mole to the side of Kihyun’s upper lip. His hand finds Changkyun’s, pulls it more around his waist so he’ll touch him more firmly, with more confidence, and Changkyun smiles, rubs his face in Kihyun’s shoulder. “You can go back to sleep, babe,” Changkyun says. 

“You woke me up too much,” Kihyun disagrees. Slowly, navigating around Changkyun’s hold, he turns himself over so he’s encompassed in Changkyun’s chest, his face resting more naturally at the curve where Changkyun’s neck meets his shoulder. They usually spend so much time in isolation, but lately, there have been so many other people, Moira and Emma and Stupid Sarah and even Minhyuk, and it feels like they haven’t been alone together in so long, just the two of them. Kihyun is tired of the in-between, tired of the journey. He’s ready for the destination. Changkyun holds him so carefully, kisses the top of his head so carefully, and Kihyun sighs, shifting his legs to entangle them with Changkyun’s. “We’re driving, right?”

“Car’s outside,” Changkyun nods. “We can leave whenever you want.”

It’s not that spending the morning in bed isn’t something that appeals to Kihyun’s sensibilities, but the more conscious he gets, the more he thinks about what’s to come, the Westchester County mansions, the realtor named _Jacqueline, _not Ginger or Kitty or Sheila, the wealth, his home, and then he starts getting restless, kisses Changkyun on his mouth and gets out of bed to make some coffee, at least. As far as their mornings go, it’s a fast one, not even that much sleepy uncoordinated kissing, and they take their coffees with them in expensive thermoses, both embossed with their respective initials — a belated moving-in-together present from Changkyun. Kihyun is so, so used to this. Once they’re dressed, business informal at best since Jacqueline is an old friend of the company’s, they head downstairs, where Changkyun’s car, an understated Maserati (“I didn’t pick it myself, it was a high school grad present”) that typically lives at KB Pharma’s corporate garage, is waiting on the street as if by magic. But any residual belief Kihyun could possibly have had in magic is long-gone; he knows perfectly well, has seen the proof a thousandfold, that it’s all just money. Changkyun drives, and Kihyun puts on his McQueen sunglasses, rolls down the window, and luxuriates.

“I hope you boys had a good breakfast, because we have a _long _weekend ahead of us!” says Jacqueline, parked curbside in front of an awkward, sprawling Colonial and wearing a pantsuit. She’s bleach-blonde, but that’s her only flaw. “Mr. Im, a pleasure as always.”

Kihyun’s nose half-wrinkles for a moment. How strange, to behold Changkyun being taken seriously. Everyone shakes hands, introductions are made, and then Jacqueline tells them about the home, which Kihyun can already tell is wrong for them: the portico is propped up by six malnourished columns, and the window shutters are a mismatched shade of green. But he’ll let Jacqueline show them around, because he’s never been in a single-family home this large that wasn’t a museum, and Changkyun comments positively on the landscaping and chimneys, so in they go, through what Jacqueline tells them is called the ‘Grand Reception Hall’ — glorified foyer at best — and into the first of three living areas. 

“Do you like it so far?” Changkyun asks Kihyun eagerly, and Kihyun looks up from the glossy brochure Jacqueline had given him and frowns, craning his neck to see the high ceiling.

“It’s very… big,” he says, which is true, and Changkyun gives him a smile that seems somehow incompatible with the relative blandness of what Kihyun had just said. Hm. 

“So this is a six-bedroom, seven-bathroom home,” Jacqueline is saying. They go into the kitchen, which is extremely uninspired. White cabinetry and an outdated dishwasher. “This home was built in 1990, but remodelled in 2006 and then again in 2017, which is why it’s in such amazing shape.”

This is what passes for amazing in this town? Kihyun can’t help but feel a little disappointed. Jacqueline shows them another living room, then the first of the six bedrooms, and she wasn’t kidding, this is going to be one hell of a weekend. Kihyun already knows this isn’t the place for them, so there’s no real point in seeing the rest, and yet he follows anyway, asking questions, jotting down specifics in the tiny notebook he’d brought with him. He catches Changkyun’s eyes slipping over in his direction more than once, but Kihyun isn’t writing anything interesting, just _ask about HOA fees _and _forced air unacceptable _and _smells funky, _because it does. 

They go to the second floor, which is just more of the same. But here, in the third living room, Jacqueline gestures to the wooden support beams lining the ceiling and the hand-hewn cabinetry lining the walls, and says, “So these are antique to the 18th century, aren’t they just incredible?”

“Oh!” Kihyun says, and just smiles mildly and shakes his head when Jacqueline and Changkyun look at him inquisitively. “They’re beautiful, yes.”

“And there’s a bathroom right through here,” Jacqueline says, opening a door, but while she goes in first, Changkyun leans in closer to Kihyun’s side.

“What?” he whispers, as nosy as ever, and Kihyun tries not to roll his eyes, gently bopping Changkyun’s arm with his notebook.

“Nothing. That just explains the smell,” he whispers back. 

And Changkyun laughs, loudly and obviously, then covers his mouth with his hand to hide his mirth. “I noticed it, too,” he says from behind his fingers. “But I wasn’t going to say anything.”

Kihyun shrugs. Why is Changkyun so amazed by Kihyun pointing it out? “Do you still like this place? I’m kind of not feeling it,” he murmurs, which is putting it mildly, and Changkyun opens his mouth to reply but then Jacqueline, evidently frustrated by their slow walking pace, comes back to haul them along to the master suite. 

It is, admittedly, grandiose, but Kihyun hates the way this place has been staged, all pleather and macramé, which is making it difficult for him to envision his belongings, the gorgeous furniture he hasn’t had Changkyun buy yet, moved in. The bathroom is nice, decent tub, but the walk-in closet is laughably minuscule, and Kihyun, well-attuned to Changkyun’s emotions after 15 months of keeping him under a microscope, can tell that Changkyun doesn’t like it here, either. That’s why when Jacqueline leads them back down the stairs — what $3 million dollar home _only_ has two stories? — and asks, “So are we ready to tour the grounds?” Kihyun doesn’t think twice, just says, “Actually, Jacqueline, I think we’ve seen what we need to see with this one.”

Jacqueline, a woman unused to being stopped in her tracks, stops in her tracks and blinks down at him. “Are you sure?” she says. “There’s a gazebo and an orchard, it’s a very beautiful property.”

“We’re sure,” Kihyun says, and feels Changkyun squeeze his hand. 

Jacqueline takes a moment to readjust, then nods. “Our next location is a couple of miles away; you can just follow my car. All good?”

“Perfect,” Changkyun says, and when they’re back in the Maserati, he leans across the console and kisses Kihyun, but Kihyun can’t tell if he’s excited about the whole prospect of house shopping together or if there was something specific that Kihyun did, and all they talk about on the drive behind Jacqueline’s powder-blue Mercedes is the house they just saw and the one they’re about to see. Kihyun keeps his responses neutral, factual. No need for Changkyun to know just how high his standards are, or just how deep his disdain for this whole exercise runs. 

The next home is another Colonial, this one red brick and even more of an eyesore than the first. But Changkyun likes the ivy crawling up the walls, his smile not diminishing for a moment when Kihyun remarks that it’s an invasive species, you know, and Jacqueline unlocks the front door with a code and shows them inside. Grand staircase, but terribly cheesy wallpaper, and Kihyun tucks one fingernail under a peeling chip of the floral pattern and scrapes back while Jacqueline and Changkyun are distracted. God, are they going to have to have a home built for them? He knows this can be a lengthy process, and they’ve only seen two places so far, and maybe it’s just the town that’s wrong for them, but still — he’d expected better. 

“Seven bed, seven bath,” Jacqueline explains. “This property was once owned by a winner of the Congressional Gold Medal, isn’t that interesting? I know you said a pool wasn’t important to you, but it _does _have one, and maintenance is included with the house, along with gardening services, you saw those beautiful topiaries out front—”

It’s musty in here, and Kihyun isn’t listening to her. He hadn’t known it was possible for staging to be worse than at the first house they’d seen, but this one is fully crazy-cat-lady, all the armchairs are chintz, the drapes match the wallpaper and make him dizzy, the rugs are mismatched and twee. This is also just a very boring property, and it comes as no surprise that it hasn’t seen major renovations since 1984. Changkyun slides a finger along the edge of a built-in shelf in the living room, and Kihyun takes gentle hold of his wrist to turn his hand-palm up to see the dust gathered on his skin. They exchange brief, amused looks, and Changkyun wipes the dust off subtly on the back of one of the sofas. 

“Let’s see the upstairs,” Jacqueline suggests after they see the horrifying wood-panelled kitchen, and Kihyun is starting to get fidgety again — he doesn’t like this place, and he doesn’t want to waste their valuable time on seeing a home they won’t be buying.

“How about those curtains? This reminds me of Wonho’s house, honestly,” he remarks to Changkyun, low and under his breath, and Changkyun snorts a laugh, seeing that for the barb it was intended to be. Bless Wonho’s heart, but Kihyun can’t account for his taste. 

“Really?” Changkyun murmurs, and Kihyun nods, his hand on the small of Changkyun’s back as they go up the grand staircase side by side.

“Last time I visited, he had a dining room set exactly like that,” he says, and Changkyun breaks into quiet giggles again. Jacqueline glances back at them and they hush up, then see one of the four bedrooms on this floor, which has a very crusty en suite bathroom and shag carpeting. 

“Hm,” Kihyun says. “Not my favorite.”

Then Jacqueline leads them to the master, and the master’s walls are painted a sickening shade of lavender, and Kihyun and Changkyun take one look at each other and Changkyun has to cough into his hand and Kihyun fights very hard to hold back a smile, very hard indeed, but doesn’t fight at all to keep from saying, “I’m sorry, Jacqueline, I think we don’t need to see the rest of the house — it’s not right for us.”

“You could have this whole interior repainted,” Jacqueline attempts, but Kihyun shakes his head gravely while Changkyun continues to fake cough to hide his laughter. Jacqueline bounces back well, though, is mostly unfazed by this second consecutive defeat, and smooths her hands down the front of her suit jacket before leading them back out of the house. “That’s all for Irvington; our next three properties are in Tarrytown.”

“Great, lead the way,” Changkyun nods, opening the passenger side door of the Maserati for Kihyun, and Kihyun, smiling to himself, slips in and gets comfortable. This time, when Changkyun gets into the car, he puts his right hand on Kihyun’s thigh, and Kihyun blinks over to him, warm and surprised. “This is kinda fun.”

“Fun?” Kihyun repeats. “Both of the houses we’ve seen so far have been _so_ bad.”

Changkyun shrugs and starts the car, then puts his hand back on Kihyun’s thigh. Kihyun spreads his legs but just slightly, just enough to give his fingers room to curl around. “Everything is fun with you. I like how you don’t want to settle for anything you don’t want.”

“Well,” Kihyun says, a little flushed as Changkyun drives out onto the street, following Jacqueline’s car, “we shouldn’t have to settle. We’ll be living here permanently, right? I don’t want an outdated kitchen and worm-eaten crown molding in my forever home.”

“No, you’re right, of course we shouldn’t settle,” Changkyun nods. His hand is very warm on Kihyun’s thigh. “I just… like doing stuff with you.”

“So do I,” Kihyun says, smiling to himself, and turns on the radio. They listen to Queen the rest of the drive to Tarrytown, and all the while Kihyun is wondering about what this means, that Changkyun finds it funny or endearing or something very like it when Kihyun’s innate bitterness slips out. At least in the context of shopping for a house; probably not anywhere else. It’s surprising, since Changkyun loves it so much when he’s sweet and placid, but not unwelcome. He might be overthinking it, anyway, but he’ll certainly have the chance to test his theory out soon, as Jacqueline’s car leads them through wrought-iron gates to a shingle-covered house atop a hill, and Kihyun can already tell by the peaked gables and turrets that he is _not _going to like this place, either.

“So this is a new construction, finished in April,” Jacqueline says. It smells new, too, and Kihyun’s shoes squeak on the shiny marble in the entryway. But there’s an immediate problem; for all the grandeur this house had affected from the outside, the ceilings are shockingly low, and Kihyun squints up at them, giving Changkyun’s hand a light squeeze.

“Well, _we’d _fit in here, but we couldn’t ever have Hyungwon over, his posture would get even worse from slouching through these doorways,” he murmurs while Jacqueline is distracted, trying to find the remote control to the foyer’s recessed lighting. How this continues will all be in Changkyun’s reaction — if he laughs, then Kihyun has learned something new, and he’ll maintain his snippy running commentary in Changkyun’s ear, the live-in devil on his shoulder, throughout this whole process. But if he doesn’t understand, or if he looks away, then Kihyun will back off, return to being the calm and easy-going version of himself he’s painstakingly crafted for Changkyun to enjoy. He’s testing the limits of Changkyun’s interest, pokes around the edges like he’d do with a bruise that hasn’t bloomed blue on his skin yet, feeling where it begins and where it ends. And — and Changkyun laughs, short and cut-off to avoid Jacqueline’s attention, and Kihyun has a very strange feeling in his chest. All these months spent with him, for him, and he had no idea Changkyun liked him sarcastic. What a waste of time. 

“Let’s see the first floor, at least, I bet the kitchen is super weird,” Changkyun breathes back, and Kihyun nods, and they slip their arms through each other’s and follow Jacqueline through the labyrinthine rooms. But the kitchen is quite pleasant, actually; or it would be, if it weren’t for the white cabinets again, an oddly misshapen island. The library Jacqueline shows them next is admittedly wonderful, but the guest bedroom is such an appalling shade of taupe that Kihyun feels the end of this tour fast approaching. 

For his purposes, he’ll need a house with at least three stories, and this one is four, not bad. The staging isn’t awful, either, and really the only issue is the ceiling height, making the whole place feel cramped and claustrophobic. It’s not right for them. Jacqueline tells them that this gated community is all still in the process of being built, they can customize a home however they like, but Kihyun can see the neighboring buildings through the windows, they’re all too close together. “That’s something I’ve never understood about places like this,” he says quietly to Changkyun as they return to the car. “If you’re paying upwards of five million dollars for a house, wouldn’t you at least want some privacy? I don’t want to see our neighbors any more than I have to, at a price like that.”

“I completely agree,” Changkyun says, smothering his smile, and then they see two more homes in Tarrytown; one is too old, practically decrepit by Kihyun’s standards, and the other is on a waterfront and therefore picturesque, but altogether too close to an aggressive-looking flock of geese. Kihyun doesn’t talk continuously, far from it, keeps his mean-spirited remarks few and far between, and Changkyun loves each one, to the point that his fake coughs start to become real coughs and Jacqueline, concerned, opens up her clutch and offers him a Ricola. Changkyun really is having fun, Kihyun can tell. He’s so delighted when Kihyun makes one of his sour asides, his eyes light up, his grip on whatever part of Kihyun he’s got clutched between his fingers tightens. Poor Jacqueline, but Kihyun doesn’t have time to pity her — Changkyun is paying her to do a service, and they’ve all got a job to do. 

They break for lunch in White Plains. Jacqueline is stopping by one of her friends’ offices, so Changkyun and Kihyun go alone to a charming open-air bistro, French cuisine to get them in the right mindset for their wedding. Not that Kihyun hasn’t been in that mindset for more than a year already, but at least Changkyun has gotten with the program. Changkyun has some confit, Kihyun a rack of lamb, and they share a profiterole for dessert, Changkyun licking cream from the tip of Kihyun’s finger and making him laugh, pushing his face away and kissing him after, dipping a little further into the realms of PDA than he’s strictly comfortable with on a regular day. Changkyun is starting to get into some kind of mood, a variant on his typical young-and-in-love condition, but before it can develop any further, they pile back into the car to head to Rye, their next destination and final stop for the day.

“Tomorrow, we’re hitting Bronxville and New Rochelle,” Changkyun says, checking his email. “I told her we wanted a house fast, which is why this is on such a sped-up schedule.”

“I don’t mind waiting a _little,” _Kihyun shrugs, reclining his head against the seat. Changkyun’s car is so nice, and Kihyun wishes he’d drive them around more, but no, he has to take the subway like one of the common folk, so Kihyun has to suffer with him. “But it’d be great if we were moved in before we even left for our wedding, you know?”

“That’s the goal,” Changkyun nods. He pulls them out onto the road, and Kihyun rolls down the window, skims his fingers along the summer breeze. Changkyun asks a question, and Kihyun, distracted by the sun through the trees and the comfortable leather seats and the promise of security, comfort, happiness for the rest of his days, misses it, and asks him to say it again. “Do you have more of an idea of the kind of house you want now, though?”

“Oh,” Kihyun says, and thinks about it. “Yes. Definitely hardwood throughout, except for a _tasteful _tile in the kitchen and bathrooms. No fewer than five bedrooms. No ranches, no colonials, nothing modern. Decent-sized lot. High ceilings. Good natural lighting, but not floor-to-ceiling windows. Immaculate landscaping, not too ostentatious. All state-of-the-art appliances. Maybe… Craftsman style? I’d even settle for Victorian.”

Changkyun is grinning his brightest smile, and his hand has found Kihyun’s knee again. “This’ll be a piece of cake,” he says, and he’s not kidding, he’s so serious, this is barely an inconvenience for him. “We’ll find the perfect place.”

“I know we will,” Kihyun says, and when they stop at a red light, he leans across the console to kiss Changkyun’s cheek. 

It’s not often that Kihyun enjoys his weekends with Changkyun. But, loath though he may be to admit it, this _is _kind of fun. Jacqueline’s car, which they caught up with just outside of Rye, leads them through the winding roads of a golf course — Changkyun doesn’t golf, thank God for small miracles — and up along an equally winding driveway, until they’re pulling up to what is truly the most ridiculous house Kihyun has ever seen in his life. What makes it all the worse is that he can immediately tell that Changkyun adores it. It’s a Tudor revival, impossibly huge, sprawling stone and brick and hedges and soot and, unless Kihyun is very much mistaken, gargoyles, and Changkyun can barely contain his excitement as he parks the car behind Jacqueline’s and gets out.

“How much did she say this place cost?” Kihyun asks, incredulous, and takes Changkyun’s hand to keep him under control.

“They listed it for 8, but we could probably push for 7.5, if you’re interested,” Jacqueline responds. She sees Changkyun’s ear-to-ear grin and, money-hungry bottom-feeder that she is, mirrors it with a smile that’s just as bright, gesturing grandly up at the castle. “Isn’t it magnificent?”

“It sure is attention-catching,” Kihyun says.

“I love it,” Changkyun says, turning to Kihyun. “Do you love it?”

“Well, let’s see inside first, then I’ll form an opinion,” Kihyun says, but he will not live in a Medieval Times facility, he simply won’t, not even for Changkyun. It feels damp even from the driveway, all that cool, dark stone. Jacqueline fiddles with the lockbox on the door, tells them some story about the property manager of this home, then shows them inside. 

“Oh,” Changkyun breathes, awed.

“Oh,” Kihyun says, disgusted.

“So this home was built in 1929, but doesn’t look like it’s from 1529? It’s all been updated recently, and of course it’s beautifully maintained,” Jacqueline says. Her voice echoes around the foyer, which is hardwood from top to bottom, staircase, railings, walls, ceilings, everything. The windows are all strange half-circles atop rectangles, filigrees of stained glass adding some color to the dim light streaming in, and it’s painfully pretentious, so fucking artificial, Kihyun would think it were funny if it weren’t so hideous and if Changkyun weren’t so genuinely enamored. “Incredible hand-made detailing, look at that.”

She points to a carved portion of the banister, and Changkyun leans in to peer at it, making an impressed noise. Kihyun doesn’t bother, because he sees something more interesting, namely a living room that actually seems half-decent. He leaves Changkyun’s side and goes into the room, but before he can say anything complimentary, he makes direct eye contact with a metal head on one side of the mantle. It’s wearing a rather tortured expression and has an identical twin on the other side, and Kihyun stops in his tracks, frowning at it. This house is so strange that it’s verging on goofy. He turns his head to the right and sees that one of the walls of the living room is decorated with a tacky, moth-eaten tapestry and sighs, crossing his arms and waiting for Changkyun to come to him, which he does in another moment.

“This place is amazing,” Changkyun says, putting his arm around Kihyun’s waist. 

“For people that like this sort of thing, I imagine this is the sort of thing that they like,” Kihyun says drily, and Changkyun laughs briefly, dropping his head onto Kihyun’s shoulder. 

“You don’t like it?”

“That’s not what I said,” Kihyun shrugs, and uncrosses his arms so he can slide his hand into Changkyun’s. “Let’s see the rest.”

But the rest isn’t much better. Kihyun knows that he should probably ease up on the mockery since Changkyun genuinely likes this house, but it’s not his fault when the place looks like this. “Historical oak floors,” Jacqueline says helpfully in the mudroom behind the kitchen.

“Yes, I could tell,” Kihyun says and prods the tip of his shoe into a softer plank of hardwood, listening to the resulting creak. 

“Very inventive lighting,” Jacqueline says, second-floor guest bedroom, pointing to a malfunctioning chandelier.

“Oh, is that what that’s called?” Kihyun says.

“And these were imported from Japan,” this time about some silk inset panels decorating the wall of another guest room.

“Seems a little anachronistic,” Kihyun says, “you know, for the Tudors.”

“Limestone fireplace,” Jacqueline boasts.

“Ah, just what this place needed,” Kihyun says. “_More_ limestone.”

And Changkyun can’t stop laughing the whole time, so enchanted, like it’s their first date all over again, doesn’t even resent Kihyun for making fun of this place he loves. He tries to join in the fun, asking Kihyun quietly, “So where’s the torture dungeon?” and breaking into helpless giggles when Jacqueline coincidentally points them in the direction of the wine cellar. His hands go on Kihyun’s hips from behind when they’re filing down a surprisingly narrow corridor between rooms on the third floor, or ascending a cobblestone staircase in the expansive back garden. Kihyun knows what he’s doing, but doesn’t know why, what about this is working for Changkyun as strongly as it is, and he goes along with it anyway, quietly lambasts the plaster ceilings, the fact that this walk-in closet would be better suited to Princess Peach than to Henry VIII, how he has a lot of vague ideas about how he would like to live and being in a _Game of Thrones _reenactment isn’t one of them. He and Changkyun can keep all their mead here, he says, pointing to an inexplicable treasure chest at the foot of the master bed, and watch the jousts from _this _tower, order executions whilst sitting on this balcony in particular. Kihyun is having fun, too, he realizes belatedly. But the tour has come to an end, and Jacqueline shows them back outside and asks, “Well? Should we make an offer?”

Changkyun is still laughing. His cheeks are warm and he’s looking at Kihyun. “No, I don’t think so,” he replies, seeing the way the edge of Kihyun’s mouth lifts. “But it’s a really beautiful place, thank you for showing it to us.”

“We’ve got one more in Rye, then we’re done for the day,” Jacqueline nods, and heads for her car.

“Go on ahead, we have to get gas first,” Changkyun apologizes. Kihyun, who knows perfectly well that they filled up this morning, raises his eyebrows but doesn’t say anything, just watches Jacqueline drive away and lets Changkyun open the back door of the Maserati for him.

“What are you up to, hmm?” he says, starting to smile, and gets inside. All of a sudden Changkyun is in his lap, the door is closing behind them, and a neat little trick with a button on the center console makes the windows of the car darken a few shades, granting them privacy. Changkyun’s hands are on the sides of his neck and he’s kissing him, and Kihyun kisses him back, pulling him in closer instinctively, swallowing down the relieved, needy noise Changkyun makes. 

God, what’s doing it for him, the domesticity? The commitment of buying a house for his smart, pretty husband-to-be? Kihyun pushes Changkyun’s shirt up to his shoulders and sucks on his earlobe and lets Changkyun undo his fly and rub him over his Calvins, and it’s so good to have him all to himself again, here, where he’s all for Kihyun, not being polite for a stranger or showing off his architectural knowledge in front of someone he wants to impress — here, he’s so desperate when he clutches for him, curls their tongues together in Kihyun’s mouth and rocks his hardening dick against Kihyun’s thigh. Kihyun decides to take yet another risk and mumbles, “God, that house was so damn _silly,” _and Changkyun’s laugh is breathless and heady, so in love. 

“Did you see the code Jacqueline put into the lockbox?” he asks, strained, hips bucking up against Kihyun’s touch when Kihyun slips his hand between his thighs, too. “Can we break back in and make out on that four-poster?”

“The one that looked like a B-movie set made out of plywood and spray-painted plaster? Baby, get us something mahogany, something that’s gonna last,” Kihyun murmurs, and kisses him, finally undoes the rest of his shirt buttons so he can press himself against the warmth of Changkyun’s chest. 

“Anything you want,” Changkyun manages, wraps his arms around Kihyun so tightly, squirms all needy, if they keep kissing like this they’ll both show up to the next house showing with their mouths bruised, but Kihyun can’t stop, doesn’t want to, and he likes being in expensive cars with Changkyun, even more so when it’s one that Changkyun owns. It’s a big back seat, with enough room for all manner of wicked deeds. The darkened windows are steaming up, and Kihyun lets Changkyun slide down onto his knees between Kihyun’s thighs and do what he does best, but as good as it is, it’s somehow not enough, Kihyun’s mouth feels empty, too, and so that’s how they end up sixty-nineing in the back of Changkyun’s Maserati while their paid-by-the-hour company realtor waits for them at another mansion half a mile away. 

They show up to the final house very, very late. Visibly disheveled, Changkyun’s buttons redone haphazardly at best. Jacqueline has the decency, and is being paid well enough, not to say anything, and this house isn’t all that bad but it’s not great, either. Typical midcentury Georgian, needlessly grandiose windows, strange mirror choices, the whole nine yards. Jacqueline asks if they can see themselves living there, and their responses are fairly ambivalent, because they’re both still flushed and lazy-handsy, casual gropes and easy touches as they walk through the house, and they’d rather be done for the day and start again tomorrow on a fresh head. 

“But this is close,” Kihyun reassures Jacqueline. “I don’t love the brick, and the garage is a little small, but other than that, it’s _almost _what we want.”

Jacqueline is clearly a very patient woman, but they’ve put her through a lot today, and her smiles have gotten tighter and tighter. Kihyun is curious about the extent of her professionalism, but she’s given few indicators of wanting to be done with the whole business. He’s sure she’s had worse clients. “I’ll make a few calls, see what we can see tomorrow,” she says. “I’ll send you both the addresses, in case you’d like to go by yourselves, without me getting in the way.”

Ah, so she has tired of them. “But you’ve been so helpful,” Kihyun says, charming and genteel, all but batting his eyelashes at her. “Seriously, Jacqueline, I wouldn’t even know where to _start.” _

“Then of course I’ll be there,” she reassures him immediately, fearing for her commission. Kihyun, privately smug, maintains his neutral smile and nods. “If you have any thoughts, or anything specific you’d like me to find, please, don’t hesitate to call.”

“Thanks, Jacqueline, see you tomorrow,” Changkyun says, shaking her hand, and she drives back to the city no doubt to complain to anyone who will listen about the day she’s had.

As for Changkyun and Kihyun, it’s unfortunately undeniable that they’ve had a blast today, and normally Kihyun is worn out after spending time with him, but this — this is easier, somehow, so he’s not as tired, and they laugh all the way back to Manhattan, playing Queen’s greatest hits as loud as they’ll go while the Maserati roars them home.

“I’ll behave today, I promise,” Kihyun says the next morning, pouting at Changkyun while Changkyun helps him with the buttons on his shirtsleeves. 

“You don’t have to,” Changkyun smiles. “I want you to be honest about the houses. Why live somewhere you don’t totally love, right?”

Kihyun keeps it to himself that he definitely doesn’t _totally love _his current living situation; he never did get around to throwing out that painting in the main room. “Right,” he says, and gives him a little kiss. “You, too. I’ll try to be more… accepting, if you like one that I don’t.”

“Thanks,” Changkyun grins. He takes Kihyun’s hand in his left, and his car keys in his right. “Now let’s go find our house.”

“Wouldn’t it be amazing if we found _the one _today? Then we could just be done,” Kihyun sighs. 

“Well, let’s not jinx it,” Changkyun says while he puts on his sunglasses and starts the car, and damn if he doesn’t look good doing that, the rich bitch Kihyun had expected him to be instead of the sensitive intellectual he actually is. He catches Kihyun smiling at the sight of him and smiles back, and they’re in New Rochelle in record time, Changkyun evidently spurred on by Kihyun’s interested gaze.

Kihyun has high hopes for New Rochelle. It’s the classic, iconic residence for the ultra-wealthy. And he really did mean what he’d said about behaving today — today is supposed to be all about finding the winner, not making Changkyun giggle with his wit. But the first house _really _tests his resolve, vintage exterior but glass-and-steel modern interior, and finally he breaks, leans in to whisper in Changkyun’s ear, “We can’t live here, I’ll just feel like I’m Cameron from _Ferris Bueller _all the time.”

From there, it’s the same as it was yesterday, Kihyun saying most anything that comes into his mind about the houses they’re touring. This Carrara marble floor is _petit bourgeois _at best, the round windows make him feel like he’s in a submarine with a hole through the hull, and there’s one unfinished basement so bleak that all he can say about it is that it’s the saddest thing he’s ever seen in his life. Hey, he’s never claimed to be original. So New Rochelle is, disappointingly, a bust. But then Jacqueline gives them directions to Bronxville, and Kihyun reads about it while Changkyun drives, Depeche Mode on the stereo today, and he _really _likes what he sees: America’s most expensive suburb, home of Frank Abagnale Jr. and five Kennedies.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Kihyun murmurs to himself, and feigns ignorance when Changkyun asks what he’d said.

Their first house is on a huge lot. It takes four minutes to get from the main road to the front door; Kihyun likes that. He rolls down the window, sticks his head out, to get a better look as they pull up — Colonial, white stucco walls, dark grey shingled roof. It’s… a good-looking house, Kihyun has to admit, tall and refined and imposing without being overly serious or ostentatious, and he gets out as soon as Changkyun stops the car. 

“So this house was built for the mayor of Bronxville in 1910,” Jacqueline says, and Kihyun tilts his head up to see the whole of it, feeling the same kind of cold shiver down his spine he’d had when he’d seen Changkyun for the first time, through the window and across the street. _This is it,_ that’s what that shiver means. _Here’s your chance. _

Changkyun seems to think he can tell that Kihyun likes it so far. He’s doing his most knowing smile, murmuring that they should get in there and see the place, ask about the specs. But Kihyun doesn’t even need to know anything else — he barely even needs to see it. He knows where he is. Now it’s a matter of convincing Changkyun, but that won’t take much.

It happens fast once they’re inside. The white walls are so perfectly complimented by the rich, dark wood of the stairs and the floor, and Kihyun exhales, just once, and nods, while Jacqueline tells them this is a seven-bed, nine-bath, finished basement, kitchen designed by some exclusive German brand, the whole house is on its own private generator in case of a power outage, massive terrace, no pool. Semi-open floor plan, privacy when you want it, connectedness when you’re in the mood. It smells clean and fresh, elegant, and Jacqueline leads them through to the kitchen and Kihyun barely holds back a gasp.

“I like this,” he murmurs, tilting his head to speak right against Changkyun’s ear.

“So do I,” Changkyun breathes back, but that’s not it, he doesn’t understand, he’s not paying attention. Kihyun’s grip tightens imperceptibly on Changkyun’s wrist.

“I _really _like this,” he continues, just as low, and his lips brush Changkyun’s neck. “I want to bend you over that countertop. You can fuck me on the island. Let’s never cook in here, hm?”

“Oh,” Changkyun coughs. His cheeks go pink under Kihyun’s watchful eye, and Kihyun grins, kisses the bolt of his jaw, leans away again. Yeah, he’s starting to get it. And Jacqueline is none the wiser, prattling on and on about what a historic and coveted location this is. 

The first floor is gorgeous. There’s an office, a separate study, a sitting room, a dining room, two living areas. All with beautiful views onto the back terrace and garden and land. But the real attraction is the master suite, which has its own bay window and reading nook and the most stunning walk-in closet Kihyun has ever seen. Floor to ceiling cabinets made of wood so dark it looks black, leading through to a spacious bathroom, tiles polished until they’re practically mirrored. It’s masculine, sophisticated, clean. There’s a view directly onto the deep-rimmed bathtub from the end of the king-size bed, and Kihyun can _see_ them living there, can see himself lying in wait, a gun under the pillow, until Changkyun emerges from the bath and comes to him, dripping with expensive water and perfumed soaps, and offers himself up willingly, bares the milk of his throat to Kihyun and begs him to strike. Kihyun is getting carried away, but this is it, he’s here, this is the one, and he plucks at Changkyun’s sleeve to get his attention.

“Do you think the furniture comes with the house?” he asks, and Changkyun looks around, shrugs noncommittally. 

“Maybe. If you were interested, we could probably ask, but can’t we do better than this? I’d definitely want to bring along the bed we have now, at least.”

Kihyun nods and uses his grip on Changkyun’s shirt to tug him in closer. “We should at least negotiate to keep the chaise,” he murmurs, glancing over at the velvet fainting couch that’s bed-adjacent, then looking back at Changkyun, who is looking at him.

Changkyun doesn’t look away. “Jacqueline,” he calls, starting to smile. “Let’s talk.”

_MONTH 16_

“He really didn’t say anything about us being late,” Kihyun says, rereading the opening paragraph for the fifth time. The tips of his fingers are stained with newsprint ink, but he doesn’t care, he’s being so careful with these pages otherwise, because that’s _his _photo, right there in the New York fucking Times. His name. His life. Most of it a fiction, but a grain or two of truth, just enough that he’ll feel absolutely no remorse in thirty years when Changkyun is long-dead and the only thing left of him will be his fortune, safe in Kihyun’s hands, and this very article. They’ve read it together twice now, but Kihyun can’t get enough of it, currently sprawled out on the living room couch while Changkyun, uncharacteristically stir-crazy, packs a box full of books.

“He said he wouldn’t,” Changkyun shrugs. 

“Right, and every reporter is trustworthy,” Kihyun mutters. But he has no beef with Andrzej-but-call-me-Andy, who was perfectly unassuming and harmless, worse-educated than Kihyun but better-employed, bespectacled and prepared with his notebook and voice notes app ready to go as soon as they were sitting down. He’s painted Kihyun and Changkyun in very flattering colors, and Kihyun has a stack of this Sunday’s Times five copies thick on the coffee table for later lamination. Another thing Kihyun has is an email from his mother, which is waiting for a reply; he knew he’d be hearing from her after the publication of this article, his parents have always maintained a subscription and read each edition every morning like clockwork, but he somehow wasn’t expecting it to happen so soon. He’ll respond to her later. For now, he savors the second paragraph, then the third, which is his favorite because it’s all about him. _Mr. Yoo, 28, is a market research analyst at CallBack, an advertising firm focused on building brand recognition for under-appreciated art forms. He graduated with honors from the University at Buffalo. _

“What part are you on?” Changkyun asks. “Also, do I really need two different translations of _Les Misérables?”_

“Yes, you do, and the part about how we met,” Kihyun says. If one more person asks Kihyun and Changkyun to retell their meeting story, he’ll just start screaming, he’s no longer responsible for his reaction. It’s exhausting, and he has no idea why everyone wants to know about it, from Moira to Andy to Minhyuk, because to him, that’s the least interesting aspect of their whole relationship, and yet here they fucking are. “Want me to read aloud?”

“Please,” Changkyun says, smiling back at him and putting all four collected tomes into the box. “You know I think everything sounds better in your voice.”

God, this again. Kihyun rustles the newspaper to cover his smile and sits up taller, clearing his throat. “‘The couple met by chance in April 2019 during a mishap at Midtown’s King’s Street Coffee, but it wasn’t until their second encounter in Grand Central Station, in an event that Mr. Im fondly referred to as ‘the cutest meet-cute of all time,’ when sparks really flew. Mr. Yoo was on his way to a meeting and Mr. Im was distracted by thoughts of an upcoming merger, leading to four spilled coffees and one ruined pair of shoes. But Mr. Yoo said there were no hard feelings, as the pair felt an instant connection. ‘It was love at first sight,’ Mr. Yoo said. ‘I knew right away that he was the one. Running into him again, just like that, only proved what I already knew.’”

“I love that line,” Changkyun murmurs.

“‘Although both were in a rush, they delayed their goodbyes. For fear of missing his window of opportunity, Mr. Im invited Mr. Yoo out for dinner that weekend, unable to wait any longer to see him. A three-hour meal at Thomas Keller’s Per Se featured heart-to-heart conversations and quotes from Catullus, as well as the realization that they were far more similar than they had initially suspected. Conversation flowed easily, recalled Mr. Yoo, and he found himself already planning a second date before the first had even concluded,’” Kihyun continues, his smile only growing. If only Andy knew just how thorough Kihyun’s planning had been — still is. “You want me to keep reading?”

“Better than any podcast,” Changkyun says, high praise coming from him. Kihyun recently learned just how much money he gives to various indie podcasts — apparently that’s what he does all day, fucking listen to podcasts and eat pistachios and try his hand at writing awful poetry — and he subsequently had to nip a small crush on the host of a show about philately in the bud. Not only did Changkyun stop listening to the podcast after Kihyun had completed his efforts, he’d also sent back the merch packet they’d mailed him as thanks for his patronage, with the excuse that it should go to a more _serious _stamp collector, not an amateur like Changkyun. Kihyun never loses when it comes to Changkyun, which is a nice level of security to have, especially with the dreaded family lawyer meeting coming up this week.

But Kihyun has been trying not to think about that more than he has to, and certainly not around Changkyun, who has gotten better than ever at deciphering Kihyun’s microexpressions. He clears his throat again, and reads, “‘Both pursued each other with equal intensity, sensing that this relationship was worth exploring. ‘I didn’t even know I was looking for a soulmate until I just bumped into mine,’ Mr. Im admitted. After follow-up dates at live music bars, art galleries, and, on one notable weekend, Los Angeles, they made their relationship official, and Mr. Yoo even introduced Mr. Im to his friends, a group of notoriously tough critics. ‘I’ve never seen my friends take so quickly to anyone before,’ Mr. Yoo said, laughing. ‘If that’s not proof that we’re destined to be together, I don’t know what is.’”

Changkyun sets down the books he’s holding and does a little round of applause, grinning. “Bravo!”

“I still think that’s a really weird place to end the article,” Kihyun says. “And the title— ‘The Coffees Fell, and So Did They’? Seriously? He couldn’t come up with _anything _better?”

“It’s cute,” Changkyun defends. “Plus, they’re all like that.”

Kihyun scoffs under his breath and flips to the other page, skimming the companion piece to theirs, which is about two physicists from Narragansett who met at the lab — it’s called ‘Finding Love at Work? It’s Not Rocket Science.’ He wrinkles his nose, folds the paper to close it, sets it back down on the table with the others. Changkyun is still looking at him, and that look is usually Kihyun’s cue to ease up on the sarcasm and just enjoy whatever it is Changkyun’s enjoying this time. “I know,” he agrees and lets his smile come back up. He stands, too, to go help Changkyun with the books. “Don’t mind me, you know I love every word of it. We’re still getting it framed, right?”

“Already sent a copy off to one of Connie’s friends,” Changkyun nods, and Kihyun bites the inside of his cheek to keep his expression from darkening, just thanks Changkyun in a perky voice and kisses him on the cheek. 

They’re all set to move next weekend. Changkyun’s packing is a token gesture at best, since people who have as much money as he does don’t need to pack their own things; there’s a company for that, a whole host of companies working in tandem to make the process as painless as possible, like it’s not even happening. All Changkyun and Kihyun have to do is unlock their new front door and go into their fully-furnished paradise. Kihyun’s not worried. What he is worried about, however, is the meeting happening the day after tomorrow, the family lawyer, the family _accountant, _finally, preparation for the merging of lives, merging of finances, making sure Kihyun will be well-provided-for afterwards. Possibly the most important moment of this whole sham courtship thus far. Kihyun is genuinely petrified for the first time since meeting Changkyun that something might go wrong. He knows Changkyun will fight for him, but if he makes the wrong impression, if he says anything even slightly suspicious, he has no doubt that these bloodsuckers will make the process of accessing Changkyun’s inheritance and estate a living hell for Kihyun. But he’s fairly sure Changkyun hasn’t noticed his preoccupation and anxiety regarding the meeting, so it’ll be fine. Based on the way Changkyun is kissing him back, his cheeks going that delicate shade of pink that means he’s in a specific mood that demands lots of praise and attention, Kihyun will find plenty of ways to keep himself busy until then. 

Kihyun hasn’t been doing daily affirmations looking at himself in the mirror weekday mornings, but it’s a near thing. They’re meeting the lawyer at her office on the Upper East Side — of course that’s where it is — on Tuesday afternoon, and Kihyun’s hands shake when he’s alone at work, but he knows he can do this, he knows he can pull this off. All he’s been doing for the past year is sucking up to Changkyun and his acolytes; he knows how to work rich people. This meeting will be no different. He listens to “Killer Queen” on repeat for an hour and a half and feels a little better, then fucks Changkyun slow and steady on the floor of the living room and feels better yet. 

But despite all his careful efforts, Changkyun, meddling son of a bitch, figures him out. “Don’t be scared,” he says softly, his hand curling around Kihyun’s in the cab (blessedly, Kihyun has just about trained him out of his subway preferences). 

Kihyun exhales tightly and blinks at Changkyun, feigning surprise. “Me? I’m not scared.”

Changkyun just gives him a look, the one that means _I understand you’re trying to put on a brave face for my sake, but I see right through you. _“Just because Tamsin has known me my whole life doesn’t mean she’s protective of me.”

Oh. Is that what he thinks Kihyun is worried about? Making a bad impression on an employee of the family, someone who has known Changkyun since infancy, because he wants to be _liked?_ God, Changkyun is so self-centered and naive, it’s almost funny. “Of course she’s protective of you, it’s literally her job to have your best interests at heart,” he points out, easily taking to this narrative Changkyun provided for him. Sure, of course that was his concern. What else would he possibly be concerned about?

“It’s her job to have the _company’s _best interests at heart,” Changkyun disagrees. “If I fuck up, it reflects badly on the company, which is why she has to keep me in line.”

“You do yourself too little credit,” Kihyun murmurs.

Changkyun shrugs one shoulder, soothingly rubbing his thumb over the back of Kihyun’s hand. “And I promise she’s not as intimidating as she might seem, okay? She’s very professional, that’s just how she is. But she’s a softie underneath all that. You’ll see.”

“I hope you’re right,” Kihyun sighs and gives Changkyun’s hand a squeeze in return. 

“Besides,” Changkyun says, “who wouldn’t love you?”

Kihyun smiles at him, kisses him, runs his hand back through Changkyun’s hair to smooth down some stubborn vertically-inclined strands, and leans against his shoulder as the car continues through the streets. At Changkyun’s request, the driver had turned on some music, and they’re currently being treated to a Mendelssohn octet, a light confection of a piece that is entirely at odds with the tension roiling under Kihyun’s skin. But Changkyun seems appeased by his own explanation for Kihyun’s nervousness, so Kihyun doesn’t work harder than he has to to affect neutrality, keeps worrying at the soft flesh on the inside of his cheek and looking out of the window. 

The car stops and Kihyun’s insides lurch. Changkyun takes him by the hand and leads him to the gilded doors of the office, kisses Kihyun’s knuckles and lets him go in first, doesn’t check in with anyone, just follows a familiar path down the quiet, carpeted hallways. “That’s her,” he says, gesturing to one of the three portrait-quality photographs on the wall.

Kihyun will never understand the arrogance of lawyers. Yes, this is your office where you are partner; your name is already on the building, in the title — why do you need _additional _proof of your presence? The photograph Changkyun indicates is of a middle-aged woman with close-cropped greying hair and it does nothing to abate Kihyun’s nerves. She looks like a hard-ass, intelligent, ruthless, and Kihyun half-considers feigning illness and begging off to go back to the apartment, hide his head in the sand until the threat is gone, but he _has _to see this through. Smart women either adore or despise Kihyun, nothing in-between. He just has to play his cards right. “Oh,” he says.

“She has this hilarious dog, a Basset hound. They hike through the Adirondacks together every summer,” Changkyun says. “She skipped my middle school graduation because she was taking Jack 2 — I think she’s on Jack 3, now? — to get groomed.”

Kihyun starts, genuinely, to smile. So Tamsin has no issue prioritizing her own needs and interests over something significant to Changkyun and his family. Never mind the fact that attending a child’s _middle school graduation _is an absurd notion to begin with; she chose something else, something equally inconsequential, something easily rescheduled. Changkyun was right, she doesn’t have his best interests at heart at all, and the tight spot in Kihyun’s chest swells with relief and with respect for her. Yes, this will be just fine after all. “That’s so cute,” he says. “Well, not that she skipped your graduation, but… I don’t know, she just looks like she’d be a cat person.”

“I know, right?” Changkyun says, flashing him a quick smile, then tests the doorknob of the first office down the hall and goes in once he finds it’s unlocked. “She’ll probably be here in a minute, she said she was coming from another meeting.”

Kihyun nods, follows Changkyun in, looks around the bookshelf-lined walls of Tamsin’s office. And his attention zeroes in on a framed picture, dust-free and easily visible, displayed in a space otherwise devoid of books. He steps closer. “Changkyun,” he says.

Changkyun, already halfway to the desk, comes back over, going still and quiet when he sees what Kihyun is looking at. “There we are,” he murmurs, evidently aiming for casual and missing.

Kihyun has seen photos of Changkyun and his parents before, of course, he’s got at least three framed in their living room alone. Over the course of these past fifteen months, they’ve talked plenty about Changkyun’s childhood, what his upbringing was like, how even though Changkyun had a whole team of nannies he still felt closer to his mother and father than to any of them. But this one feels different; this is the one Tamsin chose for her office, as representation of the family whose legacy she must uphold. Changkyun is about nine or ten in the photograph, visibly restless and annoyed, and his mother is as elegant as ever, his father stern but with jovial eyes. They look like a family, at least, more than Kihyun and his parents ever have, and Kihyun sighs, feeling Changkyun’s arm go around his waist. “I wish I could have met them,” Kihyun says, so soft, low and wistful and pensive.

Not the first time he’s expressed that sentiment, but with their wedding on the horizon it’s more poignant than ever, he’s sure. Changkyun takes in an unsteady breath. “So do I,” he agrees, just as quietly.

“Especially your mom,” Kihyun adds. 

“Oh,” Changkyun says, and when Kihyun turns his head to see him, Changkyun’s eyes are very distant and his awful lower lip is trembling. “She’d have loved you.”

Kihyun never has moral qualms about what he’s doing. Not even now, as he turns away from a portrait of a family years-dead to kiss its lone surviving son on his vulnerable mouth. Many people have done much worse, he reasons. And Changkyun is a willing enough victim. Right now he’s murmuring that he’s so glad he has Kihyun, that he’ll never let him go, he’ll keep himself safe so Kihyun never has to be alone. Kihyun knows Changkyun has quiet worries about separation, and this was the finishing touch, the pièce de résistance, the final nail in Changkyun’s coffin. God, Kihyun amazes himself sometimes. And that’s how they are when the door opens and Tamsin comes in, Kihyun encircled in Changkyun’s arms and their heads tilted softly together. 

“Don’t mind me, we’ve just had this meeting scheduled for weeks,” Tamsin says drily, and Kihyun likes her immediately, letting go of Changkyun’s body but not his hand, and letting his cheeks flush pink. 

“At least I was on time for once,” Changkyun says, also blushing, but he guides Kihyun over to the chairs surrounding Tamsin’s imposing desk so they can do introductions. “Tamsin, this is Kihyun, my fiancé.”

Kihyun has the incomprehensible urge to say _how do you do. _He doesn’t say that, just shakes her hand firmly but not too firmly and says, “Nice to meet you.”

“You, too,” Tamsin says. “Please, have a seat.”

But before they can, the door opens yet again, and a squat man in an eyesore of a checkered tie comes in, bearing a file under one arm and a laptop under the other. This must be the family accountant. While they’re all greeting each other, Changkyun puts his hand on the small of Kihyun’s back, fingers dipping ever-so-slightly underneath the hem of his shirt, which sends shivers up Kihyun’s spine, ticklish and familiar and unexpected all at once. As a result, he _completely _misses the accountant’s name, which is a damn fucking shame, considering that he’s arguably the most important person in the room to Kihyun. Fuck. And of course it’s Changkyun’s fault, and Kihyun’s jaw works tensely to keep his smile maintained as they all sit down, Tamsin and the accountant on one side, Changkyun and Kihyun on the other.

“Let’s keep this brief,” Tamsin says. “We have the prenuptial agreement already formatted, all you have to do is sign it. If you’d like a rundown or summary beforehand, I’d be—”

“We won’t be signing a prenup,” Changkyun says, sounding offended that she’d even suggest it. Three shocked heads turn sharply to look at him, even Kihyun, who had suspected this would be happening, but to have reality meet his expectations so spectacularly is a particularly rare treat. 

“Changkyun,” Tamsin says carefully. “I mean no disrespect to Kihyun, or to your relationship. A prenup is simply the best course of action. Of course it accounts for a worst-case scenario, which I’m _sure _you won’t encounter, but you should still consider—”

“That’s final,” Changkyun says. His posture is straight and his eyes are determined, and Kihyun looks at him with renewed respect, his fingers circling loosely around Changkyun’s wrist. “You can insist on it all you like, but we won’t sign.”

Tamsin purses her lips tightly and looks from Changkyun to Kihyun, who is just as resolved, trying for some softness in his eyes as if to show how grateful he is for Changkyun’s protective generosity, the faith he has in them as a couple. “You’re right, I can’t force you,” she says after a moment. “But give this some more thought. It shouldn’t be an impulse decision.”

“It’s not,” Changkyun says, but Tamsin continues over him:

“You have to remember that it’s not just your assets that are involved here, but also the company’s. That being said, we can table the prenup for now and move on to the will, which I believe you also wanted to discuss?”

Now this should be interesting. Changkyun confirms that yes, he’d like to go over the terms of his last will and testament, and Tamsin opens up a large file already on her desk, withdrawing several sheets of paper. “As it currently stands, in the event of your death, the vast majority of your funds will be evenly divided amongst the rest of your surviving relatives,” she says, turning one of the papers around and sliding it across the desk so that Kihyun can see it. “Now, you still haven’t mentioned these terms to anyone outside of this room, correct?”

“Correct,” Changkyun says, “and that’s a good thing, too, because I’m changing it completely.”

Tamsin arches one eyebrow, and Kihyun shifts slightly in his seat, lips pressing together to keep from smiling. “How would you like to change it?”

“Should we say… seventy-five percent to Kihyun?” Changkyun says. “That still leaves, what, 50 million to spread between the cousins? They’ll be fine.”

God. Kihyun squirms again, his face as neutral as humanly possible. This is another aspect of this meeting that they’d discussed briefly before coming in, but still, hearing Changkyun speak it into law is different than a simple brainstorming session. He makes himself look somber, reluctant, because for appearances’ sake, he shouldn’t _want _to inherit that money, Changkyun’s untimely death is something to pray against, not plan for. Changkyun glances at him with a small, brief smile, so different and authoritative when he deals with the consequences of his own fate, and Kihyun echoes him with a more melancholy one in return, then looks at Tamsin, who isn’t even all that surprised — she must be pretty used to Changkyun’s impulsive bullshit by now, especially considering the document she’d handed them has ‘version 3’ written at the top. What twenty-something has gone through _three _iterations of their own will? Changkyun has always been this morbid, it seems.

“Do you agree to these terms?” Tamsin asks, directing her attention to Kihyun, and Kihyun takes a breath, sits up straighter, nods solemnly. Tamsin takes the paper back, uncaps a black pen, and draws an X over the whole page, rendering it invalid. “I’ll have a new version written up for you both to approve by the end of the week.”

“We should also get together with the life insurance people, set Kihyun up as the beneficiary of my policy,” Changkyun adds flippantly, and Kihyun can’t help it, he balks at that, squeezing his hand.

“Babe, this is… this seems like too much,” he says, incredulous, voice lowered.

But Changkyun is resolute. He shakes his head, new steel in his expression, and says, “It’s not too much. I can never be too careful. If anything happened to me, I need to know that you’d be provided for and safe.” His eyes dart back in the direction of the photograph of his family, and Kihyun doesn’t protest further, just nods in understanding and skims his thumb over Changkyun’s wrist. 

“I’ll add it to the docket,” Tamsin says, then gestures to the accountant, who has been sitting perfectly quietly this whole time, seen and not heard, not speaking unless spoken to. Why couldn’t Changkyun have learned his manners from him? He’d have turned out a lot better as a person, far more tolerable. The accountant opens the file he’d brought with him, takes out several forms, and clears his throat, and all the while, Kihyun can feel Changkyun’s loving eyes tracing somewhere over Kihyun’s jaw and ear, the familiar prickle of being watched making him shift slightly in his chair and reach to hold Changkyun’s hand more firmly.

“As discussed, we’ll be doing a full account combination as soon as the marriage documents go through,” the accountant says in the reediest, most droning voice Kihyun has ever heard. Did he come straight from central casting? He’s almost too stereotypical. Kihyun bites back his smile and sits quietly, seriously, nods in response to his statement. “But we can begin the process today by scheduling an appointment with Bank of America. Mr. Yoo, I believe you’ve brought your current bank information with you today?”

“Ah— yes, I have,” Kihyun says, and lets go of Changkyun’s hand so he can withdraw print-outs of his most recent statements, as well as photocopies of his driver’s license, from the bag they’d brought with them, then pass them over to the accountant. 

This is all so surreal — he’s not actually moving more slowly than he usually does, but he still feels like he’s underwater, delayed, syrupy, dreamlike. This is really happening. After August 18th, he’ll be able to check his bank account and see eight zeroes in a row, he’ll have his own titanium card, metallic and heavy in his wallet, he’ll quit his job, he’ll buy a car, he’ll be rich, really rich all by himself, not just relying on Changkyun’s sometimes absent-minded generosity. Finally. It’s taken him so long to get to this point, from the whole courtship until now, and even before then, the three years since Wonho’s ridiculous wedding, and even _that _wasn’t the origin, not really — maybe there’s a grain of truth to be found every time Kihyun says he was waiting his whole life for Changkyun, because he remembers all too well the student loans he’s still paying off and is about to pay off in full, thanks to Changkyun, and before that, those bitter high school days of working menial, humiliating minimum-wage jobs, knowing he could do better than this but not knowing where to begin. It began in Grand Central last April, and it doesn’t _end _here — it ends with Changkyun six feet under — but it develops here, ripens, comes to fruition. The accountant is looking over his papers, and Kihyun’s husband-to-be is by his side as he always is, none the wiser as to why Kihyun is so happy about all of these proceedings.

Shit, can’t be too openly excited without a good reason. “I can’t wait to be married to you,” Kihyun murmurs, leaning closer to Changkyun. “It’s really happening.”

Changkyun’s responding smile is embarrassing, so bright and unstudied and childishly delighted. “It really is,” he agrees softly. 

The accountant clears his throat again to get their attention, and Kihyun snaps back to him, polite and focused as ever. “We’ll handle all the necessary paperwork, authorizations, and account closures in advance — all _you_ will have to do is go to the bank, present photo ID and proof of address, sign your names on the line, just like opening a regular bank account. And that’s it,” the accountant finishes, setting his pen back down.

That’s it. He makes it sound so simple. Like Kihyun hasn’t been planning for this for what feels like a lifetime. “Sounds doable,” he says.

“Very much so,” says the accountant, fixing Kihyun with the kind of look that suggests he doesn’t particularly appreciate Kihyun’s attempts at levity. “But of course, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.”

“I told you we could keep it brief,” Tamsin says directly to Changkyun, who huffs a laugh through his nose. 

“Send me that updated will as soon as you have it written up,” Changkyun says. “Thank you for your time, as always.”

Tamsin closes her file and looks at Changkyun with something very akin to fondness. “I’m happy for you,” she says, then turns her steely gaze to Kihyun. “Both of you. I’m glad this is happening.”

God, people are so trite about weddings. Yes, yes, she’s known Changkyun for a very long time, but she’s merely employed by him, there’s no need for excess sentimentality. “Thank you so much,” Kihyun says, moved, touched, his non-Changkyun hand moving briefly to press over his own heart. 

“That means a lot,” Changkyun adds, far quieter. 

But Kihyun’s initial assessment of Tamsin had been correct; she’s also not a fan of needless affection, and therefore briskly concludes the meeting, standing to shoo them out. “In case I don’t hear from you before then, have a wonderful time in France,” she says. “Send pictures, I’m considering going out to Provence with Jack 3 next spring.”

Changkyun gives Kihyun a brief, significant look, and Kihyun bites his lip slightly to keep from smiling. “Will do,” Changkyun says and shakes her hand, then the accountant’s. “Thanks, Dan.”

Is he fucking joking?_ Dan._ Simplest name in the world and Kihyun had missed it? Unbelievable. “Thank you both so much,” Kihyun agrees, doing as Changkyun had done, and once Tamsin and Dan confirm they’ll be in touch soon, Changkyun and Kihyun are free to leave, so they go, their arms still linked so they can walk close together. 

“That was so painless,” Changkyun says. “_God. _Now I’m so, like, excited to get married.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Kihyun grins. “I was already impatient before, but now it’s all so _real.” _

Changkyun stops walking, turns and takes Kihyun by the hand and draws him in to himself, and for half a moment, less than half a moment, Kihyun thinks maybe he saw through that particular lie or, at the very least, caught a glimpse of Kihyun’s true intent, he nearly expects a cutting question or a concerned inquiry, but— no, Changkyun just wants a kiss, his other hand cradling Kihyun’s sharp chin with infinite gentleness and care. Kihyun leans into it, his lips barely parting, and basks in the knowledge that he is loved, he is secure, he is in control. He is in control. He has this under control. He is in control.

***

Plan A: get him drunk. Stay up too late. Suggest he take a bath, run the water warm, get him sleepy and compliant. He’ll pass out, sink below the surface, not regain consciousness even when Kihyun’s hands push on his shoulders to keep him submerged. He’ll stop breathing. Drown, just like that, in his sleep. Kihyun will leave him there and go to bed, awaken in the morning to find his corpse. Call the cops, teary and frantic and distraught, mourn him for seven months, then move on to bigger and better things.

***

Plan B: go for a walk. The home in Bronxville is near the woods. Suggest they go out in the afternoon-evening, when the light is dim and inconsistent. There’s a ledge leading over a ravine, a creek at the base. He’ll lose his footing. It could happen to anyone. He’ll fall so fast he won’t have time to look betrayed, and Kihyun will scrape his hands and body on the rocks as he tries to climb down to him, to find his broken bones. It’ll take an hour for an ambulance to arrive, secluded as they are. He’ll have stopped breathing before he hits the base of the ravine — neck and windpipe snapped. Mourn him for eight months, then move on.

***

Plan C: spice things up. Rich people have unusual habits. Changkyun was friends with artists and Beatniks in college, he’ll have avenues for purchasing all kinds of substances. Coke, heroin, doesn’t matter. This one is trashy, but Kihyun could pull it off, leading Changkyun further and further down a rabbit hole of decadence and hedonism. Until the dose is wrong, or maybe Changkyun just couldn’t get enough, but either way, Kihyun wakes up to find Changkyun dead with a needle in his arm. Mourn him for nine months. Try to avoid getting addicted as well — rehab is an ugly business.

***

Plan D: staged break-in. Oldest trick in the book. Kihyun will know where the valuables are, but once he’s got the ski mask and gloves on, he’ll have to dig for them, make a mess, make some noise, until Changkyun, paranoid and over-cautious, comes downstairs to see for himself. Kihyun would rather not get a gun — blunt force trauma will do the trick, instead. As to an alibi, well, that’s what friends are for. Find him in the morning. Mourn him for six months. Move on.

***

Plan E: staged suicide, but Kihyun doesn’t like this one. It’ll take too much psychological torture, too much energy on his part. Sure, Changkyun is temperamental, morose at times, ever-brooding, but to make this one believable, he’d have to be downright funereal in his last few weeks of life. Kihyun could pull it off, but he’d rather not.

***

Plan F: if all else fails, at least there’s always divorce!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/paratazxis) (+ tip jar link therein, if interested) (and feel free to use #FoolproofAO3!!!), [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/paratazxis), [official playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/12MLmAfM9PhFB63N7EWMww?si=yQVn9E5ZR_-1vJVLkdfFFg), [More Fun playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4uy2Cl1pvB2ebqD4mUEJ75?si=26jS0Ry5SmyqOP3TqGegmQ)
> 
> thank you all so much for reading!!!!! do please let me know what you thought in a comment or at any of the links above!!! again, don’t worry! trust in me! read the tags! but i just wanted to thank everyone so much for the enthusiasm and for sending me theories in my cc and for just.. enjoying this so much in general!!! it means the world!!!  
i know this chapter was a little character-development-y, but the next one ... will be.... a lot. i promise. **i will be updating this story on the last friday of every month**, so chapter five will go up on** february 28, **so as always, if you’re interested in getting an email update on What Happens Next, pls subscribe!! until then, thank you, send each other good vibes!!!


	5. Month 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The wedding; the honeymoon; the return; the beginning of the end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no real warnings for this one! have fun, enjoy :+)

_MONTH 17_

It’s a long flight to Paris and they’ll be landing in the afternoon, but neither of them can sleep. The private jet is outfitted with all their honeymoon fastenings, a full-size mattress in a private room towards the aft, Egyptian cotton sheets, lush pillows, everything but the rose petals — the bar is stocked with champagne, thousands of dollars a bottle, no doubt, and Changkyun requested no flight crew aside from the pilots so they could have their privacy. Kihyun thought this was going to go very differently; he’d expected Changkyun just to sleep through the flight, and Kihyun was going to catch up on his reading, maybe watch a movie or two, something actually enjoyable, not the art-house indie bullshit Changkyun expects him to enjoy, but no, Changkyun is very much awake. They can’t keep their hands off each other from the second the plane hits cruising altitude, Kihyun in Changkyun’s lap with his fingers wound tightly in his hair, imagining the whole of his life ahead of him, as soon as Changkyun gets out of the way.

“Are you going to tell me _anything _about where you’re taking me for our honeymoon?” Kihyun murmurs into Changkyun’s mouth, and Changkyun always dissolves into goo whenever Kihyun makes reference to their wedding, their honeymoon, anything about their impending marriage, and now is no different — he goes pink, presses countless kisses over Kihyun’s lips and cheeks and neck. 

“No,” Changkyun says, his voice muffled. “You know it all already, anyway.”

All Kihyun had managed to get out of him was that it was happening in Europe. Since Changkyun evidently seems to think Kihyun loves surprises, the rest is a surprise. Kihyun doesn’t even know what to consider. Maybe Changkyun rented out the whole Louvre. Maybe they’ll be sailing around the French Riviera on a huge private yacht. This is a dying man’s swan song, and Kihyun will let him have his fun, let the fantasy last just a little longer. That is his grace, his one boon to Changkyun for letting him bleed him dry. Maybe in the end, Changkyun will give him his own island as a wedding present. Kihyun smiles and kisses Changkyun again, then pulls away to eat a chocolate-covered strawberry. 

“I mean, I’ll tell you if you really want to know,” Changkyun offers, and Kihyun feeds him a strawberry, too, then tucks in against Changkyun’s shoulder as Changkyun tongues the rest of the chocolate off Kihyun’s fingertips. 

“I trust you,” Kihyun says. “So keep your secrets. That way, it’ll be more fun when we get there, right?”

Changkyun, verklempt, kisses him. “I love you so much,” he murmurs. 

“I love you, too, husband,” Kihyun says, just to make the bastard squirm, and Changkyun goes absolutely neon pink and grabs Kihyun’s hands to cover his own face with. 

“You’re trying to kill me,” Changkyun mumbles into his palms, his breath warm on Kihyun’s skin, and Kihyun laughs so merrily, so delighted, because Changkyun just understood Kihyun, the real Kihyun, for the _first_ time and he has no idea — he’s joking, complaining, and his life really is in Kihyun’s hands, and there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it. 

“Can’t I call you what you are?” Kihyun says innocently, leaning down to suck on the top of Changkyun’s ear, which is heating up red from how flustered he is. “My husband.”

“We’re not married yet,” Changkyun disagrees, blushing harder with each second. 

“Semantics,” Kihyun shrugs. “Baby, kiss me.”

Changkyun emerges from behind Kihyun’s hands and kisses him, which lasts them over about a third of the Atlantic. Kihyun makes a quiet, giggling reference to joining the mile-high club, and then it rapidly emerges that Changkyun is already _in _the mile-high club, and Kihyun pins him down to the floor by sitting on his hips, hands pressed firm to Changkyun’s sturdy shoulders, and pulls the story out of him, but it’s really not that interesting, just rushed mutual handjobs in eleventh grade while Changkyun snuck his boyfriend of the time along on a family-and-friends vacation. No need for all Changkyun’s red-faced dramatics and squirming. But the squirming is more appealing, and Kihyun gets distracted, and it’s really incredible how much two like-minded individuals can accomplish in the seclusion and comfort of a private jet taking them to their wedding destination.

A year ago, Changkyun was scared to fly, alone or with Kihyun. Kihyun remembers vividly their first trip together in this very jet, how pale he was, how tense. And now here he is, on his back and mewling with Kihyun’s fingers inside him, spread out on the luxurious carpeted floor, and nothing ever stops them from being loud but here he continues to be loud without a single care for the pilot overhearing. Kihyun loves the way he kisses when he’s delirious and on the brink, his sensitive mouth slack, so wet, whining the instant Kihyun pulls back even slightly. He begs Kihyun to let him suck him off once he’s come, once his whimpering has subsided, and then it’s Kihyun’s turn to lie back and arch up and fill Changkyun’s desperate mouth, and Changkyun is so worked up, so happy and excited, his flushed cheeks and adoring eyes sparkling up at Kihyun from between his thighs. It’s the peppiest blowjob Kihyun has ever gotten. Somewhat depressing that the only way someone can get this excited over Kihyun is after a year and a half of deception and artifice, but Kihyun will take what he can get for now, until he can take it all. After, Changkyun crawls into his arms and they stay right there on the floor, because everything in this fucking jet is so plush, resplendent, just shy of ostentatious. Instead of shitty minuscule seat-back entertainment systems, there’s a massive flat-screen TV on the curved wall, and Changkyun puts on a French movie for them. The plot is irrelevant, the language is tiring to hear, but by touchdown at Le Bourget, they have three new inside jokes and they’ve fooled around one more time, and they’re giggly and clingy, unashamed of acting like tourists. 

“Congratulations again,” the pilot says in parting, and Changkyun is so, so happy, beaming into Kihyun’s shoulder, holding his hand too tightly. There’s always something of the lost child in him, the way he clings and worries, and so Kihyun stays close as their bags are brought inside for them and they make their way to passport control, not letting go of him for a second, not letting him out of his sight.

From there, things should go smoothly; they’d like to leave on their connection in two hours, giving them plenty of time. But they get held up at passport control for quite a while, in no small part as a direct consequence of a fairly spectacular sequence of art heists that occurred in Paris two summers ago. Once the border agents are satisfied that their suitcases are full only of clothing and lube, not wire-cutters and painting transport systems and thousands of euros in cash, they are permitted to go. Kihyun is privately seething — how _dare _anyone hold him back on the way to his sham murder wedding, how dare they question him and restrain him and try to control him, but he’s all smiles for Changkyun, relieved that it’s over and their trip can continue.

“This runs on _our _schedule, babe,” Changkyun points out thoughtfully. “Wanna go get an early lunch?”

“Ooh la la,” Kihyun giggles, and so they leave their bags on the jet, which is being refuelled, and a car takes them into Paris. While they drive, Changkyun calls the venue in Saint-Lizier and tells them they’ll be arriving a little bit late and Kihyun does his very best to distract Changkyun from the call as much as possible, his fingers on Changkyun’s buttons and his mouth on Changkyun’s neck. It’s Changkyun’s own fault for wearing a proper shirt on this long travel day; what was Kihyun supposed to do, _not _undo the lower half and stick his hands inside? Changkyun finishes with the venue and hangs up, then growls playfully at Kihyun and tumbles him back against the butter-soft leather seats of the car, and that’s how they stay until the car stops in front of Le Meurice. 

It’s only got two Michelin stars, but Kihyun supposes it will have to do for now. Most people’s idea of a quick lunch on a layover would be McDonald’s, maybe Pret if they’re feeling truly outrageous, but Changkyun is taking them out for $425 each, and that’s slumming it by their new standards. Paris suits Changkyun, to Kihyun’s chagrin. He speaks a little French, just enough to make Kihyun annoyed, tries and fails to socialize with the waiter and switches back to English, thank fuck. But his heavy-eyed melancholia, his self-conscious wealth, is perfect for this city, all its Haussmannian precision at odds with the rich tradition of disobedience and chaos that Parisians perpetuate. Old-world charm with an arrogant, mumbling twist. He and Kihyun share an entree, silk grain veal with sides of smoked eel and Swiss chard, and for dessert, Kihyun has strawberries and cream costing $40 just by themselves. He supposes that’s one use Changkyun has, although it’s nothing Kihyun couldn’t accomplish alone if he put his mind to it; he knows how to pick a casual place for a low-key meal. 

Having eaten, the temptation to meander around Paris for a few hours more is very nearly overwhelming, but in the end, it is Kihyun who sets them back on course for the airport. They’ll have time to explore Paris later, won’t they, he asks Changkyun, who goes pink and demurs a response. So they return to the airport, to their jet, greet their new pilot, don’t bother strapping in this time, just take their seats on the massive sofa and intertwine. It’s an hour and a half to the tiny airfield in Saint-Girons, and from there, barely half an hour by car to the château where they will be wedded. The chef and photographer have been at the venue for a day already, but the rest of the wedding party won’t be arriving until very, very late tomorrow night, leaving him and Changkyun alone to explore the château and its surroundings for the whole day. Changkyun asks if Kihyun is nervous to meet Jooheon in person — they interacted very briefly and very politely on Skype once — and Kihyun admits that yes, he is, and he can’t even imagine what kind of bravery it must have taken for Changkyun to meet _all _Kihyun’s friends in one fell swoop, and Changkyun just shrugs and tells him he’d do anything for love and kisses him.

And here they are, in the French countryside. Kihyun expected more. It’s just green, and sometimes it’s flat, sometimes it’s hilly. The mountains are blue and distant. He doesn’t feel any particular magic at first, but he begins to have a curious tingling somewhere around his midsection once their car stops in the large driveway of the château. It looks just like the pictures, if not better, and it’s bigger than he thought it would be, almost too big for the scale of wedding they’re going for. But it’s lovely. He wants to see the place, so he has Changkyun foist their luggage on the driver and takes him by the hand to haul him on a tour of the place, unofficial, just the two of them, exploring.

It’s dusk, and cooler than Kihyun thought it would be in the south of France in August, so he stays close to Changkyun, leeching easily off of his body heat. They hold hands, making their way through the sparse grove along the side of the château itself, and Kihyun looks at him, giving his hand a small squeeze. “How do you feel?” he murmurs. Asking how your partner is doing is crucial, apparently. It makes them see themselves as important in your eyes, that their well-being matters to you. And if Changkyun has even a semblance of cold feet, Kihyun needs to know _now, _so he has time to do absolutely everything in his power to beat it out of him.

“Amazing,” Changkyun sighs. “It’s so beautiful here. I can’t wait to see our rooms.”

“No, I mean…” Kihyun tugs very lightly on Changkyun’s hand and stops walking, and Changkyun stops walking, too, turns to look at him. “About this. About getting married. Three more days, then we’ll be married. How does that— what do you think?”

Changkyun, inexplicable as fucking ever, begins to smile. “Kihyun, of course I still want to get married, I—”

“I know,” Kihyun interrupts, frustration making his cheeks warm. “I know that. I’m not doubting any of that. I just want to talk about it. It’s a big life step, isn’t it? Most people see marriage as this _thing_ that changes them forever. The final transition from youth to adulthood. We’re tying our lives together, ostensibly never to untie them again. You don’t have _any _thoughts?”

Changkyun must sense how seriously Kihyun is trying to take this, because he stills, his thumb pausing in its constant journey over the soft inner skin of Kihyun’s wrist. “All I’m thinking is of how long I’ve wanted this, and how much,” he says, and his voice is quiet and careful. “I never doubted it for a second. You remember when I proposed to you, right after we moved in together?”

Kihyun forces himself to smile, nodding just a little. “That was silly.”

“I would have married you then and there,” Changkyun continues. “And never regretted it. I was _always _serious about you. I went into our first date thinking we might get married. Didn’t you?”

Oh, yes. Kihyun knows this isn’t a trick question, but it feels like one, and he nods again after a moment, stepping closer to Changkyun. “I did,” he says softly. 

“I think ‘settling down’ is such a stupid phrase,” Changkyun says. His eyes are very dark and very solemn, meeting Kihyun’s squarely and not looking away. “I’m not settling for anything with you. It’s a continuation. A step, like you said, and forward. New and improved, right? Never settling, never down. It’s something I’ve always wanted for us, and yes, it’s a big change, but one I’ve been expecting and preparing for since we met. I want this. I love you. I can’t wait to be married.”

Maybe part of Kihyun almost wanted Changkyun to have doubts — maybe then there would be hope for Kihyun’s soul, if such a thing exists. Moving in to Changkyun’s apartment was one thing; picking out a home for them to inhabit post-marriage was another; the meeting with Tamsin and Dan was its own beast entirely. But this is by far the most irreversible of the decisions he’s committed to on this journey thus far, and the only choice less reversible will be when he finally fills the tub, puts his hands on Changkyun’s body and turns push to shove, pulls the trigger. This was Changkyun’s last chance, and he hasn’t taken it. So he deserves this. If he’s stupid enough to have been fooled all this time, then he deserves what he’s got coming.

“Me, neither,” Kihyun whispers and leans in to kiss him, slow. “Now let’s go get fucking hitched, _husband.”_

Changkyun’s beam lights up the rapidly darkening grove, and then he shows unexpected strength and hoists Kihyun into his arms, and carries him, shrieking with laughter, all the way to the door of the château. 

Dinner, a sample of what is to be served after the ceremony itself; introductions with the photographer, whose camera can’t even hold a candle to Kihyun’s; a full tour of the interior of the château and all that is available to them. They did this via videochat a month or so ago, and thankfully, it’s not a disappointment in person. The honeymoon suite is _enormous, _with its own balcony and kitchenette and a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside — somehow rural France looks far more agreeable from the window of a 15,000-dollar-a-night room. Every surface is very slightly gilded, from the taps in the extravagant bathroom to the crown molding lining the ceiling, and there is a large painting of a naked woman over the bed. Changkyun and Kihyun both try and fail to stifle giggles. Kihyun loves the dining room, the kitchen, all the guest rooms — there are precisely nine, enough for everyone in the wedding party to have their own even if they weren’t partially coupled up, plus the officiant, who will be coming into town tomorrow. Their suits are already hanging in the honeymoon suite’s closet, but they both act too shy to even look at them. Kihyun’s pocket square is pale blue with gold detailing, and Changkyun’s is gold with accents of pale blue. Not a thing out of place. No expense spared. It would be paradise, save for the fact that all of it is built on a lie, but Kihyun is past the point of caring. 

“It feels like a dream,” Changkyun murmurs, Kihyun’s head pillowed on his chest in their impossibly, impractically large bed. Why isn’t their bed in New York this big? Kihyun makes a mental note to order one this size first thing in the morning, so it’ll already be waiting for them in their new home in Bronxville along with the rest of their things by the time they get back. “Doesn’t it? A dream come true.”

“It’s better than a dream,” Kihyun disagrees. His ear is right on Changkyun’s sternum, and he can hear the throb of his heart. This heart Changkyun has entrusted him with forevermore. God, what an idiot. “Because it’s real.”

“I don’t know how I got so lucky,” Changkyun says, and fucking Christ, it sounds like he’s starting to get choked up. The last thing Kihyun needs is a _weepy _husband. Why does this have to take so fucking long? Sure, he’s in charge here, calling the shots, he crafted this wedding to his exact specifications, his exact preferences, his childhood fucking pipe dream of luxury and wealth and comfort, but he’d have taken a courthouse appointment, over in thirty minutes, then straight to the deathbed. The birds that sing out here are different than the ones that sing in upstate New York. Kihyun has never been this far from home, and he sighs, turning his head to nestle more into Changkyun’s honey-warm skin. 

“It was about time you got a good break,” he agrees quietly. “I’m happy I could be that for you.”

“You’re everything for me,” Changkyun breathes, his hands soft and careful on Kihyun’s back, brushing up to the nape of his neck, his hair. “I love you so much.”

God. And why? What is it about Kihyun’s bland, insipid, always-agreeable personality that has Changkyun so convinced he’s in love as no one has ever been in love before? Just a testament to the quality of Kihyun’s acting. He even fools himself sometimes. 

“We have a big couple of days coming up,” Kihyun says, then remembers he should probably respond in kind and, gentler, adds, “I love you, too. I don’t even want to sleep, because then I’ll miss you.”

“Just dream about me,” Changkyun suggests with one of his dopey smiles.

The last thing Kihyun needs is _more _Changkyun in his life — his dreams are his last frontier, and he’d very much like for them to stay unconquered. “I always do,” he answers, and they kiss until they fall asleep, lips a breath apart, all entangled, intermixed. 

France isn’t bad, Kihyun has to admit. By the morning, any strange sensations he’d been having near his midsection regarding being this far from everything he’s ever known are completely gone, and he can just allow Changkyun to drag him out of their room and out on walk after walk to his doomed heart’s content. Extravagant breakfast, personally curated to their tastes. A swim in the château pool — why not? Kihyun brought his film camera along, and he takes a few pictures of Changkyun lounging in the sun, his thighs and arms spread in a perfect contrapposto. This is a week of last days; today is the last day of peace before the festivities truly begin, as the private jets bearing everyone Changkyun and Kihyun collectively hold most dear will be flying in around midnight tonight. All on-board — at least, on Kihyun’s side of the aisle — have been given _very _strict instructions to just go straight to bed once they arrive at the venue, and not to intrude upon Kihyun and his day-after-tomorrow husband until nine the subsequent morning at the _absolute_ earliest. It’s the perfect compromise. This way, Kihyun doesn’t have to deal with Wonho sleep-deprived and Minhyuk hyperactive, Hyungwon grouchy, Shownu probably in perfect physical condition but still, in his own way, tired, and they all have time to sleep, freshen up, recuperate after the flights. And once they’ve all arrived, that, in turn, is Kihyun’s last day unwed — the rehearsal dinner and bachelor parties happen quickly one after the other, Kihyun having been unable, in the end, to consent to their postponement. A night is enough time for them all to get settled in, surely. What more could they want? They’re being flown in on Changkyun’s private jets, not being tossed about in commercial coach, and as for spending time all together, that can wait until after the ceremony, until after Kihyun can finally exhale all the breaths he’s forced himself to hold for the past year. Two days, then they’re married. It’ll be hectic, that’s for sure, but Kihyun has another week of fun planned for everyone before Changkyun and Kihyun set off on their honeymoon and the rest of them go home. As is by now fairly typical for Changkyun and Kihyun, they spend the day eating fresh fruit and even fresher bread, kissing an outrageous amount, trying (and failing) to read an anthology of Rimbaud and Verlaine’s poetry, rounding out the evening with stargazing in the back garden. Not bad, for Kihyun’s second-to-last night living in sin. 

And once they go to bed, it’s even better. They don’t fuck, just lie there together, not talking — and if they’re not fucking, silent is just about the only way Kihyun can find Changkyun tolerable. It’s peaceful. Verging on idyllic. The air is just the right temperature, even with Changkyun a constant source of heat by his side. They both manage to sleep through the night, Kihyun only waking occasionally to turn onto his other side, move further away from Changkyun since this bed affords him more than enough room. Somehow, each time he wakes up just as close as he’d been before, but he attributes that to Changkyun’s innate obnoxious clinginess. The sheets are absurdly soft regardless of whether Changkyun is attached to him from heart to heel. And Kihyun is comfortable regardless of whether his soul is damned. He has no doubts; he has no guilt; he certainly has no shame. All he has is himself, just how it’s always been. 

If only he could have a few more hours of sleep. But alas, the self is his only constant even now, because this nearly-wed idyll is rudely interrupted by loud banging on the door, excited chattering outside, and Kihyun wakes immediately, sitting up and frowning. Changkyun is slower to rise, rubbing his sleepy, malleable face in the pillow with a mumble of, “Are we being attacked?”

“It’s Minhyuk,” Kihyun says crossly. “I thought I told them not to start barging in until later. What time is it?”

“Let us in!” Minhyuk shouts through the door. “Or I’ll pick the lock!”

“Don’t do that,” says another voice — languid, adenoidal. Hyungwon. Christ, they brought the whole circus. 

“Are you decent? Get decent,” Minhyuk insists, and the lock starts rattling and Kihyun sighs and scrubs his hands over his face to wake himself up. 

“Do you mind? I’m so sorry,” he murmurs to Changkyun, whose cheek is curved with a smile. 

“No, I’m happy to see them,” he yawns. “Send in the clowns.”

Really, only Kihyun should get to call his friends clowns, but for once he has to let it slide. “Hang on, let us get shirts,” he calls.

“Since when do you sleep shirtless?” Minhyuk demands, shocked and scandalized. “Changkyun, here I was trying to protect you, but you’re such a bad influence.”

Changkyun has now rolled over onto his back and is smiling up at Kihyun with one eyebrow rakishly raised, and Kihyun, annoyed with his face, leans down to kiss him. While they’re kissing, more voices join them in the hall, Wonho asking, “Oh, this is their room?” and then, a few seconds later and sounding dismayed, “Stop picking the lock, let them sleep in.”

“It’s fine,” Kihyun sighs, finding the t-shirts they’d peeled off last night piled on the floor. Changkyun holds his wrist to keep him from slipping too far off the bed, and Kihyun has barely managed to toss Changkyun’s to him and start tugging his own on over his shoulders before the door bursts inwards and Minhyuk tumbles in, followed by Hyungwon and Wonho, the sturdy shape of Shownu hovering just outside the doorway. “Well, Jesus fucking Christ, good morning to you, too.”

“My baby’s getting married,” Minhyuk wails and flings himself onto the bed to hug Kihyun, who shoves him away in disgust. Minhyuk falls to the floor but seems generally undeterred. “You’re _glowing! _You’re beautiful! Hyungwon, look!”

“I think that’s a sunburn,” Hyungwon says, politely looking anywhere except at Kihyun and Changkyun in bed as Minhyuk scrambles up to his feet and rushes around to greet Changkyun next.

“Hi, everyone,” Changkyun says, tired but warm and accepting Minhyuk’s enthusiastic hug. “Did you get in okay last night? I wonder if Jooheon is here yet.”

“Oh, we found him at the airport and all came over together!” Minhyuk says and points back to the door, where Shownu gallantly moves aside to reveal a dark-haired, beaming young man, dimpled and mature in a way that Changkyun must only envy. “We’ve all been getting along like a barn on fire!”

“House,” Kihyun corrects reflexively, then remembers himself and sits up straighter to see Jooheon. “My goodness, what an honor to finally meet you in person! Sorry it had to be while I’m in bed, but Minhyuk didn’t give me much of a choice.”

“The honor is all mine,” Jooheon grins, his accent as much Seattle as it is Seoul, then leans around to see Changkyun. “You doing alright back there?”

“I’m so happy you’re here, hyung,” Changkyun says, his smile just as ear-to-ear, and Kihyun’s instant jealousy is _visceral, _bitter metal down the back of his tongue, making his stomach twist and his nails push harshly into the meat of his palms. He takes deep breaths, acts the perfect host, waves to usher Jooheon and Shownu and Wonho further into the room, and Jooheon goes to the other side of the bed to lean down and wrap his arms around Changkyun in a tight, fraternal hug, and Changkyun’s face tucks so easily into Jooheon’s shoulder and Kihyun could claw his throat out right here for putting his hands on _his _fake fiancé like that, but he forces himself to swallow his bile and smiles up at Wonho, who is starting to tear up already.

“Are you okay? Hi, Professor, it’s so wonderful to have you,” he adds. 

“How many times do I have to tell you that you don’t have to call me that,” Shownu says, and clasps Kihyun’s hand in his warm, steady grip while Wonho, lip wobbling, clings to his other arm.

“You’re getting married,” Wonho says tremulously. **“**Also, I had a lot of champagne on the jet and haven’t slept it all off, I’ll be fine.”

“Well, you should have led with that, then I wouldn’t have wasted my concern,” Kihyun says and allows Wonho to lean down and hug him tightly, too. “I can’t believe you just let Minhyuk barge in here and trample all over my marriage bed—”

“It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve been in a bed you’ve fucked in,” Minhyuk shrugs with a mischievous grin, and Kihyun’s kill list just keeps getting longer, it’s bad enough that Jooheon and Changkyun are having an earnest and fast-paced conversation in Korean to his left, now Minhyuk is trying to fucking embarrass him in front of his husband-to-be two days before their fucking wedding. It’ll be a miracle if Changkyun is the only one not to survive this whole endeavor. 

“Classy,” Hyungwon says, swaying slightly. He always looks seconds away from having an attack of narcolepsy, but this is exceptional even for him — he must have stayed up all night — and perpetual good sport Shownu seems to be uninterested in continuing this frenzied morning as well, so Kihyun, as much the same control freak he’s always been, claps once to get everyone’s attention.

“You all must still be tired, and we have a busy day ahead,” he says when they’re all looking at him, Changkyun blinking drowsy, affectionate eyes and attentive as ever, the rest of them just varying levels of confused. “Why don’t you go to your rooms, freshen up, unpack, nap if you need, and we can just see each other at the rehearsal? If you want breakfast in bed or something, just call the number on the nightstand, they’ll bring you a full meal. We’re not doing anything until the walk-through of the ceremony this evening, so if you didn’t get any sleep at night and would rather just relax until then, be our guests. Minhyuk, do _not _sing.”

“But we’re in France,” Minhyuk whines. “You can’t just say ‘be our guest’ in _France _and not let me sing.”

“And yet I just did,” Kihyun says and fixes Minhyuk with his strongest hateful gaze, which stopped working on him somewhere around 2013. Minhyuk, predictably, just laughs at him, but he does begin to back off, tugging Hyungwon by the sleeve in the direction of the door. 

“You kids behave yourselves,” Minhyuk says with a stern wag of his finger, and Hyungwon, who has always understood Kihyun very well, pushes him out into the hallway. 

“Let’s talk more later,” Kihyun suggests to Jooheon, smiling. “I’d love to get to know Changkyun’s best friend, I’ve always been so curious.”

“Yes, definitely,” Jooheon says, and his tone is warm, but there’s— _something— _something not quite right about the smile he gives Kihyun in return, and Kihyun’s hackles raise as he walks out into the hall to join Hyungwon and Minhyuk, who flings an arm around his shoulders as though they’ve known each other for years.

“I just love you both so much and I’m so happy you’re happy,” Wonho says, then hides his yawn in Shownu’s arm. “Is it okay if I vlog your wedding?”

Kihyun has to work incredibly hard to keep from rolling his eyes. “We can discuss, but you’ll also have to negotiate with the photographer,” he replies. 

“He’s great at negotiating,” Wonho dismisses, absent-mindedly patting Shownu’s broad chest, and Shownu smiles down at Wonho with such infinite sweetness that it makes Kihyun want to retch. That being said, despite the appalling, revolting sappiness of Shownu and Wonho’s relationship, Kihyun has always tolerated Shownu very well; he’s a man of few words, but the words he has are often good, and some part of Kihyun, some juvenile, high-strung part, wants Shownu to respect him and view him as an equal, and Kihyun’s current condition, lying in bed with his louche and embarrassing husband-to-be, hair all over the place, fading lovebites along his collar, sleepy and megalomaniacal, is not particularly conducive to respect. Fucking Minhyuk, God. 

“We’ll see what we can do,” Kihyun offers by way of compromise, saving face, and Wonho smiles at him with misty eyes, then is drawn away and out into the hall, Shownu’s strong arm around his waist. Kihyun and Changkyun both lift a hand each to wave when Wonho turns to look at them again, and then Shownu has the decency to close the door behind them once they’ve gone.

They both hold their breath, listening to the footsteps and muffled voices from the hall, and as soon as they’re satisfied that everyone is an adequate distance away, Changkyun bursts out laughing and Kihyun falls back against the bed, groaning loudly and covering his face with his hands. 

“Why did I think this would be _relaxing,” _Kihyun complains, turning onto his side and wriggling closer to Changkyun, and Changkyun, still laughing, hauls him closer, pulls him in nice and tight with their legs latched together. “Sure, let’s get the whole gang back together and give them intimate access to our wedding and our plans, it’ll be fine!”

“It is fine,” Changkyun disagrees, a grin still on his face, and starts kissing over the side of Kihyun’s head, wherever he can reach. “They’re so much fun. Aren’t you happy everyone is here?”

Fuck, someone normal _would, _in fact, be happy to have all their closest friends at their wedding, especially after having flown halfway across the world to do it. “I am,” he nods, putting his arms around Changkyun in return. “I’m so happy. It’s gonna be such a fun day. I just wasn’t expecting all that, all at once.”

Especially Jooheon. There was a strange moment there, some eye contact that didn’t feel quite right. Everyone Kihyun has met from Changkyun’s life, his secretary, his assistant, Tamsin, even Jacqueline, has been quite taken with Kihyun, and quickly, not long after meeting him. Jooheon was perfectly courteous, smiling so sincerely, but something was ever-so-slightly off. Hm. If he doesn’t absolutely adore Kihyun by tonight, Kihyun will have some serious thinking to do. 

“Shownu seems great,” Changkyun comments, his fingers brushing lightly over the back of Kihyun’s neck. “How well do you know him?”

“Pretty much not at all,” Kihyun shrugs. He’s tense, has always hated that Changkyun gets access to his friends, and now Changkyun is getting access to his friend’s _husband? _Ugh. “He’s the perfect match for Wonho, though. Really keeps him toned down. You’ll see.”

Changkyun makes a thoughtful noise. “I hope Wonho’s not too mad at me after this.”

“After what?” Kihyun frowns, confused.

“After,” Changkyun continues, his tone a little smug, “we steal their title as the most perfect match out of your group of friends.”

Shit, Kihyun is _so _not in the mood to joke around. But Changkyun is clearly incapable of being serious, and Kihyun forces himself to smile, eyes sparkling in that way Changkyun likes. “I’m sure he’ll get over it someday,” he says, and leans in for another kiss. 

They spend the rest of the morning in bed. Room service, Kihyun’s favorite. Kihyun can’t deny that the food is so much better in France, better even than he expected. How is he meant to go back to stale American croissants now? Maybe once they’re back stateside he can arrange to have a fresh shipment delivered by jet every morning. Who’s going to stop him? Changkyun? As if Changkyun could ever deny him anything. Changkyun is currently offering up the last crêpe to him, although he’s clearly raring to finish it off by himself, and Kihyun accepts, enjoying the conflict between altruism and hunger in Changkyun’s eyes. Hunger wins out. Changkyun puts the breakfast tray aside and draws Kihyun into his arms, and Kihyun is going to _marry _this man — tomorrow, so soon, after seventeen fucking months of putting up with him, it’ll be nearly over in two full days. Kihyun is breathless and flustered as Changkyun pushes inside, both of them muffling their moans in each other’s shoulders for the sake of their jet-lagged friends who came all this way just to see them, and Changkyun doesn’t pull out for what feels like an hour after they’ve both come. It’s easy to lose time with him, in the afterglow. It’s everything else that’s the problem.

Kihyun rarely gets stir-crazy, but it seems a shame to stay inside all day long with all France at their disposal. He cajoles Changkyun out of bed, being so affectionate, so sweet, so tender, all to compensate for the way his stomach roils just beneath his sternum each time he remembers the presence of Jooheon. He’s so close — so fucking close to victory, he can very nearly taste it in Changkyun’s mouth when they kiss, and he’d readily kill even Minhyuk if he got in Kihyun’s way (would he need an excuse for that one?), let alone some kind-faced stranger from Changkyun’s past.

It’s important for the nearly-newlyweds to spend some time alone, for Kihyun to sink his hook deep into Changkyun’s vulnerable flesh, let him heal around it until he forgets a time before it was ever there at all, and getting lost for a couple hours in the French countryside seems very conducive to reminding the impressionable imbecile that Kihyun is the one who’s been there for him, who always will be there, none other. But when they get downstairs, haphazardly dressed and planning to tell the kitchen to make them up a picnic basket, Shownu is sitting by the grand piano in one of the breakfast nooks and reading a local newspaper while he eats a tartine. Kihyun, with a sinking feeling in his chest, realizes that he’s about to invite Shownu to come for a walk with them and is incapable of doing anything to resist this urge, and clings tighter to Changkyun’s hand to stave it off for as long as he can.

“Ah!” says Shownu, looking up to see them. “Headed out for the day?”

“Exploring the area,” Kihyun explains, courteous and smiling and fidgeting with the collar of his shirt to hide the massive, idiotic hickey Changkyun had left on him an hour ago. “We got started yesterday, but there’s always more to see.”

“Beautiful day for it,” Shownu agrees, looking out of the window.

“It seems like every day is beautiful out here,” Changkyun says, sounding very nearly shy. Ugh, of course at their core both of them are just teacher’s pets all grown up, so it makes perfect sense that Shownu has the exact same effect on Changkyun as he does on Kihyun. Kihyun stifles his urge to glower and just maintains his beatific smile, stroking his thumb along the side of Changkyun’s warm hand.

“It really does. I’ve never been to this part of France before, but I love it already,” Shownu says. Too polite to outright invite himself along, what a gentleman. Why can’t Changkyun be more like this? Shownu’s not even that rich, but he has _manners. _They all smile at each other, and Kihyun glances at Changkyun, who glances at him, and Kihyun bites the inside of his cheek to keep himself alert and stands up straighter, then relents.

“Would you like to come along?” he says, lightly and casually. “Unless— if Wonho’s sleeping, and you’d rather not leave the premises until he’s up and you can tell him where you’re off to, I understand—”

“Oh, you’re too kind,” Shownu says. He’s not _too _much older than them, but there’s something so parental and ursine about him, so _wholesome, _and it’s very nearly unthinkable that this man chose Wonho, a vapid 20-something muscle bunny who drinks exclusively margaritas and values _Sex and the City _more than life itself, to be his everlasting love. “I’d love to come. Are you sure? I don’t want to intrude.”

“Not at all,” Changkyun assures, as though it had been _his _idea to invite him. Kihyun rankles, but pushes it down. “It’s always nice to get to know Kihyun’s friends.”

Why doesn’t he know when to shut his mouth? Kihyun wants to gag him and tie him up and leave him for dead somewhere no one but Kihyun himself will ever find him. He’s _friendly _with Shownu, sure, but _friends _is an incredible overstatement; friends-in-law, at best, since Kihyun barely talks to Wonho anymore, anyway. But he’s smiling bright for everyone as Shownu folds up his newspaper, takes the final bite of his tartine, and stands. “Well, thank you for the invitation,” he says. “I’ll just go get my hat and be right back down.”

“No rush!” Kihyun says, then forces himself to be a good and gracious host and continues, “Any food preferences? We were going to bring lunch along.”

“I’m completely omnivorous, especially in Europe,” Shownu grins, then starts going up the stairs, whistling to himself. When the fuck has he had time to go to Europe? Kihyun can’t remember Wonho gushing about any overseas trips with his husband. Maybe he just hasn’t been listening. Either way, it’s hardly acceptable, and Kihyun starts thinking up a list of places to make Changkyun take him so he can outshine Shownu’s travel record.

“I’ll go tell the kitchen,” Changkyun says and drops a small kiss to Kihyun’s cheek. “Be right back.”

“Hurry,” Kihyun answers with a smile, pressing his hand affectionately and then letting go. It’s hard to allow Changkyun out of his sight during this sensitive time, when everything’s on the line, but Changkyun’s just going down the hall, just into the kitchen, and Kihyun wills his rapidly beating heart to calm. He enjoys the room he’s in instead, the handsome wooden stairs, the large windows looking out over the rolling hills and, in the distance, the mountains. Everything is going to be fine. He’s accounted for every possibility. It’s too late to stop. What’s he going to do, leave Changkyun at the altar because he’s _nervous? _Kihyun is never nervous. And Changkyun comes back in a few minutes, anyway, and tells him that they’ll have a selection of fruits and meats and cheeses and delicately flavored sparkling waters ready to go shortly. Great, now Kihyun has yet another fucking thing to worry about — Shownu is certainly physically stronger than Changkyun and Kihyun both, but is it rude to make their guest carry their things? Fuck Changkyun for putting him in this position. He fiddles with Changkyun’s shirt, smoothes it out and compliments his arms, takes a small tube of sunscreen out of his petite canvas travel bag and daubs a drop onto Changkyun’s nose, better safe than sorry. Changkyun kisses him, then gazes at him, and Kihyun is reminded uncomfortably of their very first date and how Changkyun just _stared, _unblinking and obsessive already. He deserves it, Kihyun reminds himself. Since he acts like that, he deserves it.

Shownu returns just as the kitchen brings out the picnic basket, which is wicker lined with red gingham and distastefully cliché. “Sorry, I got lost,” Shownu explains with a good-natured smile. “Here, I can carry that.” Kihyun starts to protest, but Shownu politely cuts him off, “It’s the least I can do as thanks for the invite!”

“If you say so,” Kihyun concedes. “We’re just as honored you’re coming along, really.”

Any more of these stiff niceties and Kihyun’s head will explode. But thankfully, that’s all Shownu had to say for now, so they all set off outside together, Shownu putting a baseball hat with his university’s logo on to shield his face from the early-afternoon sun. He’s so out of Wonho’s league in class, in poise, in everything. Then again, Kihyun is very much out of Changkyun’s league in nearly every way as well, and yet here he is, about to denigrate himself in holy matrimony. Hardly one to judge, although that’s never stopped Kihyun before. As they walk along the path up into the hills, Changkyun immediately entraps Shownu in conversation about the course Shownu will be teaching this coming fall, a seminar on Keynesian economics, and how Minhyuk — a math teacher at a private junior high school in Albany — helped Shownu make some presentations to keep his disillusioned college students entertained, and it is fucking insane that Kihyun feels neglected and left out during his _own _wedding weekend, and yet that’s exactly what’s happening. He’s unnecessary. Changkyun is holding his hand but otherwise not paying him any attention at all. And now he’s endearing himself to Shownu, whom Kihyun has been casually trying to impress since he and Wonho met with little to no success, and now when Changkyun is dead Shownu will be devastated, and that’s yet another fucking loose end for Kihyun to tie up. Why couldn’t he have picked someone easier? Someone less emotional, someone shallow and disconnected from the real world and generally impossible to like? Then he wouldn’t be feeling like this, the day before his very own wedding. Doesn’t make a lick of difference that it’s all artifice, all a constructed fantasy to make Changkyun’s latter days easier on both of them. It’s real enough for the people who matter, for Shownu and Wonho and Hyungwon and Minhyuk and Jooheon, everyone, and this is the way they’re choosing to act, and Kihyun is left behind in the dust as Changkyun leads the children of Hamelin away to sights unknown.

But these sights are beautiful. Over the course of Changkyun and Shownu’s conversation, they’d somehow managed to make their way fairly high up the hill, and now they can look out over the château and, halfway to the horizon, the warm-toned rooftops of Saint-Lizier. To Kihyun’s surprise, the view lessens his bitterness, because Changkyun is temporary regardless, but the world he’ll leave behind is Kihyun’s forever. He can hardly resent him too much; he’s the one who brought them here, after all. Booked the château, the private jets for everyone, this mysterious honeymoon for the two of them. Let Kihyun have exactly as much choice and control over the proceedings as he wanted. He’s been fairly unobtrusive in the wedding planning process, in fact, but Kihyun’s charity is rapidly cut short as Changkyun disagrees with a point Shownu makes, then starts off on a tangent about supply versus demand, and even Shownu’s kind-natured patience seems to start wearing thin. Can’t have Changkyun embarrassing Kihyun in front of his own wedding guests, so Kihyun smoothly cuts in to spare Shownu any further torment at the hands of the woefully underqualified simpleton:

“Yes, well, that’s why he has a doctorate in the subject,” he reminds. “Our time as English BAs will come someday, don’t worry.”

Perhaps too harsh, but it works, doesn’t it? Changkyun, chastised, merely smiles at Kihyun and concedes. “It’s just such an interesting subject,” he says. “I’ve had to learn on the fly since taking over the company, but I know I’m a little… out of my depth sometimes.”

That’s the understatement of the fucking century. Kihyun barely holds back a contemptuous snort, but Shownu nods as though Changkyun is someone to be taken seriously and says, “Well, it’s never too late to go back to school. I’m sure any masters program in Manhattan would love to have you.”

God, what’s with all these people flattering Changkyun? What is Shownu, for instance, getting out of this? Changkyun has already paid for him to come on this luxurious vacation with his bimbo husband — what more could he possibly seek? And the very worst part of flattering Changkyun is his immediate response, the way he crumbles into bashful, pink-eared demureness, and sure, one time Shownu favorably recalled a toast Kihyun had made at one of Wonho’s birthday dinners and Kihyun walked on air for two days, but _still. _He hid it. He kept it contained. Changkyun has never had an emotion that he hasn’t written all over his witless face, and that’s exactly what’s gotten him into the position he has currently found himself in, unbeknownst. 

“I wish, but I don’t know how that would align with my work schedule, unfortunately,” Changkyun sighs, despite the fact that he hasn’t spent a full day at the office in over a year. Lying victim-complex bastard. Kihyun, once again, struggles to restrain a laugh, just squeezes Changkyun’s lightly sweaty fingers with affection instead. 

“Come sit in on my class anytime,” Shownu offers. “Especially in the first third of the semester, it’s very beginner-friendly before midterms. Hell, make a week of it, you’re welcome to stay with us — we have a few guest rooms, and New Paltz has many more activities than you’d expect.”

He laughs like a Wisconsinite father of four, and Kihyun would rather gouge his eyes out than stay in Wonho’s provincial suburb while Changkyun learns about _economics _and becomes impossibly more insufferable than was ever presumed possible, but luckily for everyone, Changkyun won’t live to see this autumn. “I think that sounds like a wonderful idea,” Kihyun murmurs and presses a quick kiss to Changkyun’s cheek. “Let me carry your books to class for you, sweetheart?”

“The textbooks are probably all online these days,” Changkyun mumbles, but he’s so happy, his dimples so deep in his cheeks, and when Shownu shifts his grip on the picnic basket, all three of them light-heartedly argue over whether Shownu should relinquish it to someone else, but it ends up remaining with him after all, and they climb higher and higher up the hill until they can see another town in the distance, and more of the mountains, distant and massive and utterly unaware of any kind of intrigue, no betrayal, no life-or-death, and Kihyun very nearly feels small in comparison but then he looks at the way Changkyun’s cheek curves into his temple with the blue pulse beating underneath, sees the impermanence of his fragile human body, the one he’s swearing to Kihyun in undying fealty tomorrow, and he’s himself again. 

“How about here?” Kihyun suggests, gesturing to a shady area under some trees that Shownu quickly identifies as oak. “Perfect view, I think. Not too cold.”

“It is a perfect view,” Changkyun nods. Kihyun, unpacking the basket in order to cast the gingham blanket over the ground, doesn’t even need to look at him to know that Changkyun’s eyes aren’t pointed at the view at all; he’s been doing this shit since their very first date, and it’s by now eminently clear that Changkyun is wholly uninterested in any kind of change, growth, or development. Kihyun acknowledges him only with a smile, then sits down and pats the space of blanket by his side until Changkyun joins him, and Shownu on his left at a polite distance. “Well? A toast?”

“I’m so bad at toasts, you make one,” Kihyun says, passing Changkyun an unlabelled bottle of what was alleged to be locally-infused sparkling water. God, the amount of trust rich people place in the establishments they frequent — Kihyun’s waiting until Changkyun drinks first, that’s for sure. Changkyun accepts the bottle, pops the flip-cork cap open, and smiles at Kihyun so tenderly, so shamelessly, especially considering Shownu’s sitting right there, then pours clear liquid into each of the three simple glasses the kitchen had packed in the basket.

“You’re not bad at anything,” Changkyun says. “What’d we drink to on our first date? Let’s drink to that again.”

Oh, he’s playing coy. He thinks he’s cute. He couldn’t be more fucking wrong. “To the future,” Kihyun provides, his cheeks artfully pink. 

“I love that,” Shownu says pensively. “To the future.”

Little does he know — little does anyone fucking know about the _future._ Surrounded by his friends who adore him, by his twenty-four-more-hours husband who reveres him like a god, Kihyun has somehow never felt more alone. Changkyun repeats the toast one last time, and then all three of them drink. The sparkling water is flavored with pear. It’s cloying and bitter at the same time and Kihyun coughs and discreetly sets his glass down behind himself, making extremely brief eye contact with Changkyun, who seems to be having a similar reaction. And Changkyun’s ensuing smile is so small, so private, and the way he presses his shoulder against Kihyun’s is so gentle, and Kihyun could snap his neck with his bare hands, break this bottle on the trunk of the tree and do all manner of damage, if Changkyun touches him one more time Kihyun will break, Carrie White-style, destroy the whole town, but when Changkyun’s palm curls around the line of Kihyun’s thigh, all Kihyun does is smile in return and lean into him. 

“So how’s Wonho’s vlog been going?” Kihyun asks as they sort the rest of their victual options, unwrapping a pliant round of brie to spread on the well-crusted bread, carefully removing grapes from a smaller basket within the first. “He talks about it like it’s this huge thing — I guess I don’t know how much of a following he has?”

“I’m sure he’d love to tell you all about it,” Shownu says, leaning back on one hand, the glass of sparkling water in the other. “Last time we checked, he was just a little over half a million subscribers? Modest, for YouTube, according to him, but that sounds pretty fantastic to me.”

Jesus, a platform of that size is the last thing Wonho needs. Changkyun whistles, impressed, and offers Kihyun an apricot — there’s a thumb-shaped bruise where Changkyun had been holding it, and that’s the spot Kihyun bites into, sweeter than all the rest. “What does he make videos about? I can’t imagine putting my whole life online,” Kihyun muses.

“Oh, they’re very cute,” Shownu says, and somehow it’s devoid of all condescension, just genuinely warm and supportive, as he rubs an apple clean on the hem of his shirt and takes a bite. “He does a lot of health-and-wellness stuff, good workouts, good eating, you know. Once every two weeks he takes questions, kind of like an advice column. Very wholesome stuff.”

“That sounds wholesome,” Kihyun smiles, not without the faintest pang of guilt that he’s fallen _this _out of touch with Wonho’s life, but workout vlogs with a dose of Wonho’s glossy-eyed breathless, utterly misguided advice seem like a one-way ticket to Kihyun requesting an immediate lobotomy. It’s for the best that he’s abstained. 

“You must be really proud of him,” Changkyun says softly. “It’s great, you’re both doing what you love.”

Shownu nods, slow, and swallows his mouthful of apple. “I always say happiness like this at my age is rare,” he says. “And then Hoseok always hits my arm and makes me put a quarter in the midlife crisis jar.”

“Lot of quarters in there?” Changkyun laughs. “You’re, what, 33? 35?”

Shownu’s responding chuckle is deep and hearty, and he glances over to Kihyun with amusement. “You sure know how to pick them, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Kihyun says, staring at the tilt of Changkyun’s jaw. “I sure do.”

Conversation returns to safer topics. France, travel generally, Changkyun self-conscious and modest as he always is about the enormous opportunities life has afforded him and which he has subsequently squandered. But Kihyun doesn’t feel particularly safe, that same restless feeling from this morning crawling under his skin — horrible, dangerous, like he’s slipping, like he doesn’t have a hold on this, this situation that _he _entirely created himself, and all through it he has to smile and nod and make small talk and be affectionate and enjoy himself, because he’s ostensibly marrying the love of his young life, but he feels neither particularly young nor particularly in love. And each time he remembers who and what is waiting for them back at the château, his stomach turns, so he leaves the lovingly-hand-crafted picnic mostly untouched, but Shownu and Changkyun are going through it pretty well themselves, Kihyun’s lack of appetite unnoticed by either. 

At least, Kihyun had thought it was going unnoticed, but of course Changkyun has taken to watching Kihyun as closely as Kihyun has watched him, so when Shownu is distracted by trying to work open a second bottle of sparkling water, Changkyun leans in to murmur right against Kihyun’s ear. “You okay? Stressed?”

“A little,” Kihyun breathes back. “It’s okay. I’m having fun.”

“Say the word, I’ll fake an injury, we’ll go back,” Changkyun offers, and he’s so fucking silly and over-the-top and he’d do anything for Kihyun, absolutely anything, and Kihyun manages a smile for him and knocks him gently with his shoulder. As if to say that he knows, and he appreciates the offer, and he’ll take him up on it if need be. But not just yet. Changkyun doesn’t know why he’s stressed, anyway — not even Kihyun fully understands. He just has to wait. He has to be patient, again. Changkyun has gotten Kihyun hooked on instant gratification; expensive dinner, quick orgasm, whatever else Kihyun could possibly want, Changkyun always has it for him within the hour. But unless Kihyun can convince him to elope, even though this is already practically an elopement by American standards, this time there’s nothing he can do to expedite this process. If there’s one thing Kihyun hates in this world more than he hates Changkyun, it’s powerlessness. But he takes deep breaths, looks out over Saint-Lizier, eats a late-summer strawberry from Changkyun’s fingers — right in front of Shownu, and damn his dignity — and tries to remember everything that’s gone right so far, which keeps him from imagining everything that could go wrong.

Once he’s had a little food, Shownu is much less talkative, content to just sit and enjoy the beautiful landscape and his own thoughts. Kihyun has never minded a companionable silence with the right companion, and even Changkyun is behaving, his warm palm curled around the bare skin of Kihyun’s ankle but not bothering him anywhere else. The sky was very nearly cloudless when they set out, but now there are a few coming in from the horizon, and Kihyun can very nearly hear Changkyun’s tortured cogitation and drive for whimsy coming up with fanciful animal descriptions for the shapes he can see. Blessedly, he keeps them to himself. Kihyun feels less on-edge than he had, still doesn’t know the edge of _what_ but even so, they can’t stay out here forever — it almost feels as though they could. Why go back? Shownu could go back, but Changkyun and Kihyun could stay here, away from everyone else, away from the whole world, until they, and this whole stupid wedding, are forgotten.

“When is the rehearsal supposed to begin?” Shownu asks, his tactfulness as much appreciated as it is a reminder of Changkyun’s inadequacies. 

Kihyun takes Changkyun’s wrist and tilts it so he can read his watch. “Four-thirty, and it’s currently noon,” he replies. He leaves his fingers where they are, casually possessive and comfortable on Changkyun’s forearm, and Changkyun doesn’t mind, barely reacts, just smiles at him when Kihyun catches his eye.

Shownu nods, stretching. “I should probably head back,” he says apologetically. “I couldn’t feel it at first, but that jet lag is hitting me now.”

“Of course,” Kihyun says, and they have the basket packed up again in a few more minutes, Changkyun somehow managing to wheedle carrying rights back down the hill for himself. Kihyun has grown accustomed to being on his right when they walk together, but Changkyun’s got the basket in that hand so Kihyun ends up on his left, and he keeps getting caught off-guard whenever he feels Changkyun’s arm bump ever so slightly against him. Shownu is visibly tired by now, and Kihyun doesn’t even know who to blame for that — he’d invited Shownu along, but Changkyun had insisted, but Shownu had agreed? Wonho hadn’t kept him from leaving? It’s unclear. They do make it back to the château in one piece, though, and Kihyun reflexively holds his breath as they walk in, just in case Minhyuk is audibly shrieking somewhere and he needs to start apologizing on his behalf, or possibly just track him down to start inflicting various harms upon him. But it’s quiet and calm, and they part ways in the entry hall, Shownu thanking them again for inviting him along on their walk and apologizing for having to cut their afternoon short, but that he’ll see them both at the walk-through and rehearsal dinner. 

Kihyun can see that Changkyun has been thoroughly charmed, but frankly, he has too much to worry about already; Changkyun will likely never see Shownu again after this week, but Jooheon is another matter entirely, and now that they’re back at the château it’s like Kihyun can feel his presence in the building, a roiling stormcloud hanging over Kihyun’s blissfully mendacious fields. The longer he thinks about it the darker it gets, so he really tries not to think about it at all, going merrily along with Changkyun to return the basket to the kitchen and clumsily thanking the staff in French.

“Your pronunciation is really good,” Changkyun says, their hands swinging between them as they go back up to their suite. “You really haven’t studied it at all since high school?”

“Not a word,” Kihyun says. “_Pas du tout._”

Changkyun hums in his throat, his thumb pressing into the hollow of Kihyun’s wrist the same way it had into the apricot. Kihyun is not in the mood for such affections, he’s tetchy and underslept and pissed off, but he thinks that the sight of their gorgeous suite will cheer him up, and it very nearly does, that palatial bed, the view, but then Changkyun exhales an amused breath through his nose and Kihyun glances back to see him looking at his phone, and Kihyun’s heart does a dreadful flip of a thing and he _knows _approximately what Changkyun is about to say, and he doesn’t want to hear it, but he can’t resist, he prompts him anyway: “What’s up?”

“It’s Jooheon,” Changkyun says, like Kihyun knew he would. “He was sleeping, but his room is next to Hyungwon’s, and he’s making a lot of noise.”

“Noise,” Kihyun repeats, but he’s closing the door behind himself, and there’s a rushing sound in his head that’s making it hard to focus. “What kind of noise?”

“He didn’t specify, but I’m willing to bet it’s… what did Hyungwon say he was into, last time we all saw each other? Guided meditation? Jooheon says he’s scared to go knock on the door and ask him to turn it down,” Changkyun grins, his thumbs moving quickly over his phone screen, and Changkyun has always told Kihyun that he’s bad at texting, that he never does it, doesn’t know how to, and yet here he is, messaging up a storm with Jooheon, snickering to himself, can’t type his reply out fast enough to keep up with his own giddy thoughts. What, they can’t talk the rest of the year? They have to suddenly rediscover their intense, intimate friendship the day before Kihyun’s wedding? Kihyun sees red, and before he can stop himself, he’s stepping forward, taking the phone out of Changkyun’s hands, and tossing it onto the bed so he can pull Changkyun into a kiss instead, deep and searching right away, not wasting any time.

Changkyun makes a surprised sound into his mouth but kisses back readily, he’s always so fucking ready, and normally when they go more than one round in a day Changkyun is the one initiating the second time, but Kihyun — needs this, doesn’t know why he needs it but he _really _needs it, and he grabs at Changkyun’s face with his hands, fingers pushing insistently at the corners of his jaw to get him to open his mouth and let Kihyun lick inside. He tastes like summer fruit and like himself, like the sweet-bitter pear sparkling water, and Kihyun sucks the taste off his tongue and turns them around so he can push Changkyun back up against the closed door, and Changkyun moans all soft and touches Kihyun, too, big warm palms starting on the small of Kihyun’s back and running up until his fingers are tangled in Kihyun’s hair but not pulling, never mean. Just holding him close. 

He wants close? Kihyun will give him close. He breaks the kiss so he can mouth down over his jaw and neck, he can’t get enough, ravenous for the live warm feeling of his skin, and he loves the way Changkyun shivers when Kihyun kisses him right there, right above the hollow of his throat as he slips a hand down to start palming him through his chinos. What does Jooheon do for him that Kihyun can’t do? Kihyun makes him laugh. Kihyun could speak Korean with him, if Changkyun ever asked. Anything anyone has ever done for Changkyun, Kihyun can do better. Changkyun always reacts so quickly under Kihyun’s touch, he’s hard already off a kiss and barely anything else, and Kihyun keeps him going, his fingers skimming — nearly scratching — over the skin above Changkyun’s waistband. 

Here, Jooheon, listen to _this. _Kihyun is getting a little carried away, but how could he not with Changkyun so invitingly lush and panting hot into his hair as Kihyun sucks on his collarbone? Kihyun temporarily gives up on the appealing strip of skin where his shirt is riding up and grabs at Changkyun’s wrists instead, pushing them down, back against the door to keep them out of his way. It’s a good angle to rock their hips together, especially with Changkyun’s hands pinned at his sides, and the buzzing in Kihyun’s head abates each time Changkyun makes a low, helpless noise, and Kihyun accidentally, absentmindedly squeezes his wrists too tightly, pushes them too hard into the wood, until Changkyun winces, his breath hitching high in his throat.

Fuck. “Sorry,” Kihyun murmurs, letting go right away but staying just as close, licking at an earlier mark on Changkyun’s neck to soothe him, ask forgiveness for any pain he’d caused. He needs to reel himself back in, calm down before he _really _gets carried away, and that had been so tempting, Kihyun’s cock stiff and aching near-instantly from the surge of pleasure he’d gotten at— not _hurting _him, but very nearly, barely enough to make Changkyun squirm, but he’s squirmy enough as it is. Kihyun is breathless all of a sudden, and he presses his face into Changkyun’s neck and rolls their hips together tightly, until Changkyun fumbles between them to undo buttons, zippers, and all the while Kihyun is kissing him, wet up his neck, past his jaw to worry at his earlobe with his lips, then back over to his whimpering mouth. 

Finally Changkyun gets their pants open. But Kihyun isn’t missing a beat, and he takes them both in hand before Changkyun even has time to react. It’s dirty and hot like this, stroking their cocks together, catching Changkyun’s hoarse, needy moans right out of his mouth as he drips wet over Kihyun’s jerking fingers, fist gripped as tight as it’ll go without being painful, just tight, just good for them to both fuck into. Changkyun is just as worked up by now, not too shy to moan, and Kihyun keeps chasing his mouth, wanting to bite that lower lip, tug it back until Changkyun yelps, not let go even then, tell him _you’re mine you’re mine don’t you ever fucking forget it, _but instead he kisses him way too sloppy, tonguing him, adjusting the angle at which he’s got them in his palm until his dick is pressed just underneath Changkyun’s so he’ll hit the sensitive spot under the head on each up-stroke. 

Changkyun loves it, ravenous for anything and everything Kihyun gives him, his eyes half-open under his heavy lashes so he can watch Kihyun. Always so greedy. The eye contact is so much, too much, too hot, but it’s working for Kihyun, he’s stroking them fast and tight, just a shade more friction than normally feels good but the burn is what he needs, and he needs — teeth, Changkyun’s in his shoulder, maybe in his throat, but Kihyun would never let him get that bold, not now, not ever. Changkyun wouldn’t even want to, anyway. He closes his eyes and settles for a kiss instead, electricity crackling under his skin replacing that slithering fear from earlier, and the feeling of Changkyun’s ever-searching tongue pushing into his mouth is nearly enough to send him over the edge. But he wants Changkyun to come first, needs to know he still commands power over him wholly, completely, uncontested, and he pushes him further back against the door, surrounding him, kissing him so deep, teasing his fingertips over the slick head of his cock until Changkyun is moaning and trembling. 

It’s so stupid. He’s so stupid. He does whatever Kihyun wants — Kihyun controls him entirely. More than a marionette, more than a puppet, he’s so mindless, so possessed. Kihyun’s the stupid one for ever doubting it, but now at least they both remember. Changkyun is working his hips back and forth to fuck into Kihyun’s grip, against Kihyun’s cock, his arms wrapped tightly around Kihyun’s shoulders, turning his head to at least press their faces together, too overwhelmed to kiss. Kihyun understands — he’s oversensitive, too, that round this morning had seemed like plenty at the time, but he _wanted, _so he got. Changkyun is being so noisy, maybe even playing it up because he can tell Kihyun likes it, and normally that kind of assumptive arrogance would piss Kihyun off more, but he’s so hot for it now, loves that Changkyun does nothing save for what will make Kihyun happy, and he rewards Changkyun for it handsomely, kissing him the wet, pretty way he likes, squeezing at the tip of his dick, panting into his mouth, so insistent, until Changkyun can’t take it anymore, all the attention, and comes all over himself and Kihyun both. 

“Fuck,” Changkyun breathes. “Fuck, you’re so—” He turns his head and presses in blindly for a kiss, and Kihyun permits him that and to take over, his hand replacing Kihyun’s to curl firmly around Kihyun’s straining dick and pump him exactly how he likes it when he’s in whatever mood this is — and Kihyun hates that Changkyun can tell he’s in a mood, but _God _that feels so fucking good, the way Changkyun twists his grip and teases sensation out of him, like he’s pulling it from deep inside, not unlike the sinful things he does with his mouth when he’s sucking cock instead. He’s nothing if not consistent and dick-obsessed. And it works every time, it really does, and Kihyun moans into his eager mouth and spills into his equally eager hand, and their pants and shirts are certainly ruined, but what’s the point in debauching yourself in the château you’ve rented out for your wedding if you don’t shamelessly leave some dirty drycleaning behind? 

They stand barely propped up against the door and kiss for a long time, both out of breath and flushed and a little startled by the intensity of what had just occurred. “What was that for, hm?” Changkyun mumbles, but he’s smiling, Kihyun can hear it in his voice and taste it on the curve of his slackened lips. 

“For my husband,” Kihyun says, kisses him firmly one last time, then pulls away to strip off. By the time he’s naked, he glances back to see Changkyun standing slouched by the door, still catching his breath, very much ravished, his hair all rumpled and his lips all red. Dazed like he’s been hit over the head with something heavy, more mindless than usual, which is saying something, and Kihyun just smiles at him. He needed that; he feels better. As for how Changkyun feels, well. He’s probably fine. “Join me in the shower? I’m covered in Saint-Lizierian dust.”

Changkyun pushes off the door to join him, and doesn’t check his phone to see if Jooheon has texted again.

They’re dressed and in position for the walk-through at half past four on the dot. Wonho and Shownu are on time, but certainly not thanks to Wonho. Jooheon is there already, too, and despite Kihyun’s best, most sincere, all-out efforts earlier, Changkyun — bastard — goes _right _to his side, abandoning Kihyun with the lovebirds. Wonho hugs him like he hadn’t just seen him that morning, and Kihyun thinks back to the time right before Wonho’s own wedding in reverse chronological order, the bachelor party and the “groomal shower” (disgusting title, but nobody could come up with anything better) and the registry and the invitations and the way Wonho told them all he was engaged, he’d done it like a fucking coming-out meeting and they’d thought he was going to tell them he’d joined a cult and was moving to Arizona, but no, he’d just flashed his topaz (cheap) at them and started crying before he could get three words out. Had Kihyun been good to him then? He doesn’t remember being particularly good to him. He’d nearly skipped most of those activities. And yet he invited Wonho to fly halfway around the world to see him wed and here he is, beaming down at him, tears already swimming in his big eyes. 

“Save it for the big day,” Kihyun implores, but to no avail, Wonho sniffles and rubs his face in Shownu’s arm. “Come on, look, I’m wearing _joggers, _you have nothing to cry over. Or are you making a statement about how much you hate my casual pre-wedding outfit?”

“I’m just so happy for you,” Wonho says damply, letting go of Shownu’s arm to squeeze Kihyun’s instead. Kihyun stifles a pained noise — Wonho never really knows his own strength, despite working so hard on his physique. Not_ all _of them are vanity muscles, after all, regardless of Wonho’s protestations to the contrary. 

But before Wonho can inadvertently pull Kihyun’s arm out of its socket in his enthusiasm to talk about wedding colors, there is a loud clatter from the direction of the stairs and in tumble Thing 1 and Thing 2, flushed from running fast and already arguing. “Did I miss it?” Minhyuk shouts. “Is Wonho crying?”

Kihyun raises an eyebrow, impassive. “By some miracle of fate, you didn’t miss the whole rehearsal, no, we were just about to begin.”

“Are you crying?” Minhyuk demands, careening to a halt in front of Wonho, and Wonho just giggle-shrugs and bats his wet lashes. “God. Fuck. He _is._”

“Told you so,” Hyungwon drawls. “Pay up.”

“You placed bets?” Jooheon says with interest, watching Minhyuk grumble and dig through his pockets to find a few bills, which he flings at Hyungwon once he has enough. “On whether he would cry? Seems like a long shot.”

“Oh, this is nothing,” Minhyuk says. “Wonho crying is pretty much a given, we were just betting on whether he’d cry _before _it starts or _as soon as _it starts. You should have seen the Kihyun bingo cards we made in college, now _that _was something.”

What the fuck is he playing at? It’s one thing to try to humiliate Kihyun in front of Changkyun, but in front of Changkyun’s _best friend? _That just makes Kihyun look like an idiot for associating with such idiots, and Kihyun is beyond enraged, is about to grab Minhyuk by the scruff of the neck and toss him out of the window when Jooheon laughs, head falling back for a moment, and says, “I would love to see those, actually.”

“Might be able to dig one up once I’m back home,” Minhyuk grins. 

“I carry one in my wallet at all times, for emergencies,” Hyungwon says gravely. “Remind me later.”

“Can we get started, please?” Kihyun snaps. Way too harsh, way too strong, but why the fuck does Jooheon want to see those bingo cards, which were made specifically to make fun of and annoy Kihyun? He doesn’t know him well enough to tease him; it took Minhyuk at least a full calendar year to earn that privilege, Hyungwon at least two, and Wonho’s still not yet there. Let alone Changkyun, who has never even so much as given Kihyun a chastising look on the extraordinarily rare occasion that he acts up. _Changkyun _wouldn’t want to see the cards. He’d certainly find them offensive. Jooheon wouldn’t know any of the context, anyway, they wouldn’t even be funny. Maybe he’s looking for ways to bring Kihyun down — any crack in his armor. Fuck. A chill runs down Kihyun’s spine, and he goes over to pull Changkyun in by the arm so they can take their positions for the start of the mock ceremony; the officiant has been very politely watching this absurd scene unfold for the past few minutes. “Sit wherever you want, it doesn’t matter,” he adds, curling his fingers tightly around Changkyun’s bicep. “We’re walking each other down the aisle.”

Wonho all but swoons. “Wow,” he says, and pulls Shownu to sit with him, then beckons affectionately for Jooheon to sit by his side. 

Well, for lack of fathers. What did he think they were going to do? Kihyun shifts his weight, irritated, as he watches Hyungwon and Minhyuk pile into chairs on either side of those already-seated, then accidentally looks at Jooheon just as Jooheon looks at him. It’s not a warm look, not like the way Jooheon has been smiling cheerily at Changkyun and Minhyuk, who’s taken to him quite sincerely. No, he looks just as cold and calculating as Kihyun feels when unobserved, but he glances away quickly before Kihyun can truly comprehend the depth of his expression. Fuck, _fuck. _The officiant is saying something and Changkyun kisses Kihyun on the cheek and Kihyun wants to scream, wants to cry, wants to run out into the evening light and never look back, never see any of these fucking people ever again, but he doesn’t — he goes down the aisle with Changkyun, smiling from ear to ear. Be real. Be human. Be natural.

Moira found this officiant for them, and although they met once briefly in New York to make introductions and confirm they’d be a good fit, Kihyun doesn’t care about maintaining a connection. Doesn’t even know her name. She explains briefly how long the ceremony will take — less than half an hour, from start to finish, Changkyun and Kihyun opted to keep it fairly barebones — and reads from a list what’s to happen the night after tomorrow: the walk, the vows, the rings, the kiss, and immediately after, the signing of the marriage certificate, to be overnight rush shipped back to New York and notarized as soon as possible. It’s all very elementary school; next she has everyone make some noise so they can explore the auditory limitations of the space, a half-open terrace leading out to the expansive back grounds of the château. Everyone who wishes to speak will have to raise their voice to be heard. Thank goodness Kihyun made the executive decision for them to just use the canned in-sickness-and-in-health vows, not even giving Changkyun the chance to entertain the idea of writing his own; it’d be bad enough to have those sorts of things uttered around his friends at all, let alone _loudly. _But that’s a non-issue. Thank fuck. Kihyun could use more non-issues, especially now that he can feel the prickle of Jooheon’s eyes on the back of his neck, watching his every move. He remembers, belatedly, that Jooheon works in some kind of administration, not _quite _law enforcement but something near it. Asset and identity protection, whatever that means. He could be a plant, a mole, an actor, not a real person at all. Changkyun could have constructed him from the ground up to figure Kihyun out, lay all his secrets bare, pin him like a butterfly dying in an observation box and dissect him afterwards, make sure there’s nothing there that could harm Changkyun. Kihyun feels faint. His head swims and his heart pounds and the only thing keeping him from collapsing — this isn’t a panic attack, it’s not, he’s fine — is Changkyun’s arm holding him up. But Kihyun doesn’t even know if he can trust him anymore. He turns his head to look at him, just as the officiant says, “As discussed, the language I’ll be using is ‘you may now kiss each other,’” and Changkyun leans in and presses their lips together while Kihyun’s fingers dig hard enough into his arm that his skin, his fragile skin, Kihyun’s delicate plum, might even bruise. 

“And when do we eat?” says Hyungwon’s voice, and Kihyun breaks away from the kiss, reddening and laughing along with everyone else. Everyone but Changkyun, and when Kihyun looks to him again, Changkyun is so serious, so devout, and Kihyun takes in a breath and doesn’t release. 

“Husband,” he mouths, no sound, just enough motion for Kihyun to understand, and Kihyun softens near-immediately, nodding in assent. Exhales. Smiles at him. His refrain since day one has been that he can only trust himself, and trust the fact that Changkyun is too stupid to be able to hide anything from Kihyun in return. Minhyuk likes Changkyun, and he’s real. He likes Jooheon, too, so by extension, Jooheon must also be real. It’ll make enough sense to keep Kihyun’s spiraling mind calm for now. Kihyun kisses him more briefly, loosens up his tight grip on his arm, and turns to face their friends, smiling.

“Right now,” he says. “So if you’ll all just follow us through…”

Changkyun slides his hand down to link their fingers together, and Kihyun feels the brush of his lips over Kihyun’s knuckles — oddly reverent, oddly medieval, the same way he always is, Kihyun no longer has a reaction of any kind — but gets distracted by the sight of Jooheon and Minhyuk laughing together about something as they stand. Bad enough that Changkyun alone endeared himself so quickly; now his friend, even more of an unknown player, is doing the same thing. Adding insult to Changkyun’s future injury, Kihyun supposes. But Changkyun draws him away to lead the procession to the dining hall, and Kihyun can no longer watch Jooheon continuing Changkyun’s crusade of stealing Kihyun’s life away from him, only imagine it. 

Changkyun and Kihyun sit together at the broad head of the table. Thank God for Kihyun’s razor-sharp foresight with regard to the seating arrangements, else Changkyun would have been flanked by Kihyun and Jooheon on his other side. As it is, Jooheon is on the corner, still close, but not an immediate threat. Minhyuk is opposite him, and Shownu, Wonho, and Hyungwon fill out the rest of the seats. There’s one empty chair, and Kihyun, affecting kind-hearted generosity, says, “Well, we should have the photographer sit with us, then!”

“That’s a great idea,” Changkyun smiles, soft. 

After all, what’s another stranger at the table? By this time tomorrow, Kihyun will be half-out of his mind on thousand-dollar champagne and _married _to a _multimillionaire, _his own parents could show up and he wouldn’t even notice. For now, he holds Changkyun’s hand above the table, smiles around at this pathetically, pitifully small gathering of their friends, and waits for the kitchen staff to bring their food to them. He and Changkyun painstakingly picked the menu out themselves — Kihyun, naturally, did most of the work — with regard to everyone’s dietary restrictions and preferences, not even finicky Hyungwon will have something to complain about, and the private chef the château had hired especially for the occasion has been exec at two restaurants with three Michelin stars each, so it’s a decent start even by Kihyun’s standards. But tonight it tastes like cardboard in his mouth, like wood pulp, and if he keeps under-eating at this rate, his exquisitely-tailored suit will hang loose on him tomorrow. Changkyun is sitting on his left, as always, and his right hand comes to rest on Kihyun’s thigh after a while — Kihyun has a rushing feeling of clairvoyance_, _he knows that Changkyun will do this exact same thing when this dinner is no longer a rehearsal, and even then Kihyun will most certainly feel this same flip of disdain, the urge to shrink away and bat his hand aside so Changkyun will stop treating Kihyun like a possession, but of course he knows Changkyun doesn’t see him like that. His hand is warm, anyway. 

The rehearsal dinner is typically a chance for the members of the closest family circle to spend time together before the arrival of flocks of uninterested day-tripper guests who only came to the wedding to enjoy the open bar. Necessarily, this means it’s more intimate than the actual reception itself, with toasts and fun galore. But everyone who’ll be coming to the wedding is already here right now, and the bachelor parties are later tonight, so Kihyun thinks maybe he’ll get off easy and they can just finish here now that they’re all done eating and chatting and getting to know each other, but Minhyuk, with a certain rare glint in his eye, begins to stand and takes a folded paper out of his pocket, and all Kihyun can think is, _oh fuck._

“Listen up, because this is the first and last time I’ll be this sincere about anything that’s going on,” he warns the table to start. “You won’t get _any _emotions out of me tonight or at the actual wedding. So. This is it. Capisce?”

“Just say what you’re trying to say before you blow a gasket,” Hyungwon advises, his chin in his hand. “You know too much authentic human warmth makes you sneezy.”

And there’s the reason Kihyun has always gotten along so well with the two of them. He can’t help the smallest of smiles, but Changkyun is still there, ever-present and now more so than ever, so he turns in his chair to tilt his body closer to Changkyun’s, attentive and affectionate as he listens to whatever tripe Minhyuk is about to unload on them. This better not be anything too embarrassing — another memory flashes through Kihyun’s mind about early days with Changkyun, one of the earliest, in fact, their first date, Changkyun reciting Catullus and Kihyun making a mental catalogue of the nearest, sharpest knives within grabbing reach. But all he does for now is smile, nodding to encourage Minhyuk to go ahead.

Minhyuk unfolds the paper in his hands and puts on his teacher voice, bright and energetic. “Kihyun and I have known each other for quite a long time,” he begins, and Kihyun groans playfully, leaning closer to Changkyun, who just smiles and rubs Kihyun’s arm. “We met during orientation week of college — as most of you already know, so this is just backstory for our new friends, please bear with me — but I’d already known about him for a while. Rival high schools, he had a reputation, yadda yadda. But here’s the thing — when I met him, I both immediately understood that the stories were all true, and wondered why I hadn’t heard even _more _stories about him.” Pause for laughs, and sure enough, everyone grants Minhyuk a boon, and there Wonho goes again, already chewing at his plush lower lip and gazing up at Minhyuk, enraptured with teary eyes. “As we folks who are lucky enough to have been allowed into Kihyun’s life know, he’s a force of nature. If he puts his mind to something, it’s his. It’s like he doesn’t know the words ‘no’ and ‘can’t,’ except for in the sentence, ‘no, Minhyuk, you can’t raise hamsters in our dorm basement no matter how cute they are.’”

More laughs, and Kihyun is rapidly tiring of this, restless and uncomfortable with this much attention, but — he hasn’t seen Minhyuk in such a state for a very long time, he didn’t even talk like this at Wonho’s wedding, and — Kihyun hesitates to call _anyone _his best friend, but if he ever decided to pick one, Minhyuk would be a strong contender. So Kihyun tolerates this, putting his chin in his palm like Hyungwon, the other hand intertwined with Changkyun’s, dry for once and still so warm as Minhyuk goes on.

“Sometimes, this has been a good thing,” Minhyuk says. “He was a straight-A student who never missed a single class. Except for one time when Wonho accidentally locked himself in the university gym first thing in the morning, and I had mono so I couldn’t help, and security staff were off-duty, so Hyungwon and Kihyun had to break in through a window — I think Hyungwon had to boost Kihyun up on his shoulders so they could reach — I don’t know, I wasn’t there! But other than that, Kihyun never missed class, plus he graduated with honors and got hired straight out of college. Very ambitious and very driven. And sometimes, his drive _hasn’t_ been a good thing, like when he got it in his head that we _needed _to go to a Stephen King book signing on a Sunday night in New Haven, but none of us had a car at the time, and he must have blackmailed half of campus until we finally managed to borrow one. He drove us all the way there _and _back, since it was his idea. God, it was exhausting, but I hold that copy of _Pet Sematary _sacred! That’s the kind of friend Kihyun is. An all-or-nothing friend. He lives in a totally black and white world, no grey. Which is why when I heard he had this new boyfriend, super different from all the other ones before, I was a little bit concerned about how fast things were moving, but… here we are, right?”

He pauses to turn the paper over, and Kihyun is starting to go numb, he doesn’t know where Minhyuk is headed with this, and everyone around the table, Changkyun included, is motionless, completely enthralled, so Kihyun acts the part, too, but the more he hears the less he likes, he doesn’t want to hear this, he doesn’t want to know how Minhyuk sees him, he doesn’t want Minhyuk to tell anyone these stories, he doesn’t want to be here, he doesn’t fucking want this, any part of this. This was supposed to be about _money, _this was supposed to be _easy, _and now—

“When I got to meet Changkyun, at first I was surprised. He’s so lovely! Not that I expected him not to be, of course, but he’s _so _lovely, intelligent and big-hearted and funny. I almost couldn’t believe Kihyun’s luck. Our Kihyun deserves the best, and all of a sudden, he had it. Honestly, I was worried — is this a trick? What’s the catch, huh? He’s cute and rich and loves Kihyun to pieces, what’s the fucking catch? But—” And Minhyuk takes a dramatic breath, shaking his head slowly in awe. “There was no catch. He stuck around. Popped the question. And now Kihyun, Kihyun, who just wanted to be the best and to get his way and be happy, he— well, Kihyun is getting what he wanted, as always.”

His voice is no longer as shrill and excited, and Kihyun realizes with abject, detached horror that Minhyuk might actually cry. What’s he meant to do then? What reaction is he supposed to be having? He just tilts his head close to Changkyun, murmurs ‘aww,’ dips his lashes, smiles to himself as if in reminiscence, and tries not to fucking scream to get this perverse charade to _stop._

“Kihyun, I’m so happy for you,” Minhyuk says, with a definite wobble in his tone. “I know you think you’re hard to love. I know you think you’re difficult.” But addressing Kihyun is too intense, too direct, so he turns to the rest of the table in supplication, spreading his hands, the paper with his outline long-forgotten. “This man— this man has never _ever _said he loves me, but I know he’d do _anything _for me, if I needed it. And now he has someone who matches him in love, who matches him in devotion, finally, the very first person I’ve ever trusted to take care of Kihyun the way he deserves. The way he’s always deserved, no matter what I’ve said about him over the years. You know, boring old people love to make fun of us for thinking we’re all special, unique snowflakes, not like anyone else in the whole entire world, but that’s _really _what both of you are like. There’s no one else like you, anywhere. But you found each other. You’re getting—” Fucking unbelievable; his voice breaks, and at the immediate murmur of concern from the rest of the table, to which Kihyun belatedly adds himself, he waves their worries away, smiling unsteady but just as blinding as ever. “You’re getting married,” he resumes, sounding stronger again. “My baby bird has left the nest and I don’t have to spit food down your throat for you anymore — that’s Changkyun’s job now. And look, see?” Now directly to Kihyun, and Kihyun is anywhere but here, floating dispassionately above himself and watching his body make startled, friendly eye contact with Minhyuk. “You were wrong. Look how easy it is for him to love you. I can’t think of a better match. Congratulations, babies. Here’s to you.”

He lifts his glass to drink, and to hide his face as the table breaks out — to Kihyun’s chagrin — into applause. And Changkyun lets go of Kihyun’s hand, and at first Kihyun doesn’t understand why, but then he remembers that now is probably when he’s supposed to go hug Minhyuk, so he stands, uncertain unfamiliar movements in an unfamiliar body, and grabs Minhyuk’s bird-breakable frame and embraces him tightly.

Minhyuk’s fingers dig into his back, and Kihyun turns his head and murmurs, “Pull yourself together” into his ear. Minhyuk crows a laugh, pulling away from him but still clutching at his arms to keep them both from getting too far.

“He just told me to pull myself together!” he announces, grinning, his eyes glittering with unshed tears. “Get a load of this guy! So much for sentiment, huh?”

“Come on,” Kihyun groans, smacks Minhyuk’s arm, laughs like he can’t help it and hugs him again, rubbing a brisk palm over his shoulderblades. 

“That’s it, no more from me, drink and be merry please for the love of Christ,” Minhyuk says, painfully thwacks the upside of Kihyun’s head, and squeezes him one more time until Kihyun’s ribs rattle, then lets go. “Changkyunnie, your turn.”

Kihyun will take any fucking reprieve at this point, and he moves back quickly as if scalded when Minhyuk issues his invitation, giving Changkyun room to stand and get enveloped in Minhyuk’s grip instead. Their hug is a lot less fidgety, Minhyuk just smushing Changkyun cutesy-close, swaying him from side to side and petting his hair condescendingly, but not unkindly, until Kihyun can’t take it anymore and reaches out to just ever-slightly pluck the hem of Changkyun’s shirt, reminding him of his presence to guide him away. 

“Haha,” Hyungwon says. “Drink and be _married_.”

“Was that your whole toast?” Kihyun snips, sitting back down with Changkyun at his side, and Hyungwon shrugs. 

“I was going to do mine later,” he says, which is very bad news indeed. 

“Great pun, though, old chap,” Minhyuk says, then blows his nose noisily into one of the silk-embroidered table napkins provided by the château. How charmant. Kihyun looks away before his disdain can become too apparent, and finds Changkyun watching him instead. Hardly better, but everything is going to shit so fast that Kihyun is unable even to care. 

“What?” Kihyun prompts, a soft murmur, laying his hand on Changkyun’s knee and holding it affectionately. 

Changkyun shakes his head and covers Kihyun’s hand with his own. “I love you,” he says. “I love your friends. I love our life.”

“Our life is only starting, silly,” Kihyun smiles, the first true thing he’s said all day. Then — someone starts up the infernal tradition of clinking the champagne glass with a fork to get them to kiss, and it’s none other than Jooheon himself, looking so fondly at Changkyun, less affectionate when his gaze moves to Kihyun. And Kihyun doesn’t want to do what Jooheon says, he doesn’t want to go along with anyone else’s plan, but he can’t very well say no when he has five pairs of happy, supportive eyes watching him, encouraging him, and he hates PDA, hates marriage, _loathes _Changkyun, but he skims his fingers along Changkyun’s jaw and leans in and presses their lips together so soft, so sweet, and smiles into the curve of Changkyun’s mouth as their friends cheer.

Hyungwon, Minhyuk, and Wonho have been surprisingly successful in tight-lipping what their plan is for Kihyun’s bachelor party. All Kihyun knows is that Shownu is also coming, so it likely won’t be all that wild. Which is fine. It’s a box to check from someone else’s list, and Kihyun will let them have their fun so long as he doesn’t have to put too much effort in. And they promised him they’d handle it all; booking the hotel (on Changkyun’s dime, naturally), finding the activities, making sure he has fun, whatever that means to them. They’re set to start as soon as the rehearsal dinner is over, and sure enough, after a half-hour buffer period to let everyone change into something more festive and for Kihyun to pack an overnight bag while Changkyun watches him, besotted, and while Kihyun takes deep breaths, tries to calm down after that fucking rehearsal fiasco — the delegation shows up to kidnap Kihyun.

Kihyun looks up at them in bemused disapproval. “It’s barely even dark out yet,” he says. “We’re already going?”

“We have to get to the next town! It’ll be dark by the time we get there,” Minhyuk dismisses. “Come on, leave your things, we gotta vamoose.”

Kihyun looks to Changkyun for help, then is rapidly astonished by the fact that this will be the first night he’s spent without Changkyun in months, if not a year, that he won’t see him until tomorrow. The next time they see each other, it’ll be when they meet at the end of the aisle to walk each other to the altar. Holy fucking shit. All of a sudden Kihyun is excited for this party — finally, a reprieve. His last hurrah before the death of his unmarried self. Now he understands heterosexual men, and while he feels sour at the thought, it’s not to be helped. “I miss you already,” he pouts.

“Me, too,” Changkyun says, pouting even harder. He looks to the friends clustered in the doorway and says, “Can’t I at least say goodbye?”

Minhyuk pretends to consider it, then sighs and puts his hands on his hips. “Make it snappy.”

Changkyun sweeps Kihyun into a kiss, and Kihyun can’t stop smiling into his mouth, kissing him over and over and over even though there are people watching and this is disgusting. He’s so close to being rid of him, just for the night and then for life, and this is how he expresses it, tangles his fingers in Changkyun’s thick, silky hair and tugs him in as close as he can go, kisses fast and light, then slow and deep, until the catcalls from the doorway grow to be too much to ignore. They break the kiss, still in each other’s arms, and Changkyun rubs the tips of their noses together and Kihyun’s eyes are closed and he stands on his toes to wrap more of himself around Changkyun while he can. “I love you,” he breathes.

“I love you so much,” Changkyun echoes. “Have fun. Think of me.”

“Always,” Kihyun vows. “Do I finally get to find out what you and Jooheon are going to get up to?”

Changkyun grins, boyish and enthused that he gets to confess his little secret at last. “Some hiking around the area, and then we’re gonna go explore the ruins of that old abandoned church on the next hill over. I think Jooheon said something about absinthe but that sounds a little too intense for me right now? We’ll see. I’ll take pictures for you, okay?”

What the fuck? Why isn’t Kihyun invited? Now he can picture the two of them, clambering over ancient stones and laughing together, Jooheon extending a gallant hand to help Changkyun up the mountain, Changkyun taking it and laughing more and not letting go. To say nothing of the absinthe. Changkyun feverish amidst the crumbling colonnades, out of his mind, either flushed appealingly or pallid and weak, hallucinating with the green fairy and his childhood best friend but without Kihyun there to bring him back — Kihyun can’t abide it. He grits his teeth, but forces it into another smile, brushing his fingers through Changkyun’s hair and kissing him one more time. “That sounds perfect,” he praises. “Please be safe. Okay? Please? If you break any limbs I’ll _carry_ you down the aisle if I have to, but…” And he lowers his voice, moves in close so his lips are right on the corner of Changkyun’s mouth, and murmurs, “I’d rather have you whole, husband.”

Changkyun shivers. And Kihyun really doesn’t know why he ever, ever doubts himself. Because Changkyun _is _his, wholly, everything he ever does is proof of that, and now he just hugs onto Kihyun, his face in his neck to breathe him in, that’s all he needs, nothing more, before Wonho comes in to bodily drag them apart. 

“You get to do that every day forever now!” he reminds, all chipper, all mischievous, completely revitalized from his sentimental funk thanks to the excitement of involving Kihyun in some sort of quirky scheme, just like the old days. “Come on, you’ll see each other tomorrow!”

“I miss you,” Kihyun says desperately, reaching out for Changkyun as Wonho, laughing brightly, hauls him away. “I love you!”

“I love you more, I miss you more,” Changkyun calls after him, just as woeful. “Come back to me, Jean-Paul!”

“I will return, Jean-Pierre!” Kihyun replies, then Hyungwon, looking about as disgusted as Kihyun feels, slams the door shut in both their faces, and that’s the last Kihyun sees of Changkyun for now, shining-eyed and adoring, his hands reaching out for one final touch.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Hyungwon says, and Minhyuk’s laugh verges on _mean,_ quite the contrast to all his tenderness and affection during his toast. Kihyun much prefers this, though, not that he’ll ever admit it.

“You have to be nice to me, I’m getting married,” Kihyun retorts, his face going red. He’d forgotten, somehow, all about their inside jokes from the jet flight over, and that Changkyun doesn’t know not to make Kihyun look fucking lame in front of his friends. If only Hyungwon knew just how much shame Kihyun feels at the hoops he makes himself jump through for Changkyun. But now is not the time to think about that — now, for once, he can just think about himself, and unlike his birthday, when he was unsettled by suddenly being the heart of the party, he’s clearly reached some kind of breaking point, and he can hardly think of anything more welcome.

“Yeah, yeah, JP, come on, we have places to do and things to be!” Minhyuk insists, and links arms with Kihyun against his protestations, skipping all the way down the hall and out of the château. Shownu is waiting downstairs with the hired car, which is taking them into Castillon-en-Couserans, as Kihyun is informed by the driver, who is clearly not under any kind of Hyungwon-penned blood oath to stay silent about the plan. Always so respectful, Shownu shakes Kihyun’s hand and congratulates him, thanks him for allowing him to come along on this very special night, opens the door for him. Well, it’s not a stretch limo, but it’s plenty comfortable, some kind of new-model Bentley, and Kihyun sprawls out and basks in the swan song of his life so far, interrogating Minhyuk and Wonho to no avail as to what this evening will consist of. Still, he takes it as a blessing that they didn’t blindfold him, and he enjoys the scenery and the petite bottle of peach schnapps that someone shoved into his hand as soon as he got into the car, feeling altogether much better than he had over dinner, until they slow to a halt in front of a building with stucco walls and an iron gate. Sure enough, it’s darkening outside, the glimmer of the sun on the horizon turning everything warm, and Kihyun can’t quite make out the lettering on the building but he doesn’t end up having time to, because he’s being removed from the car fairly quickly and hustled inside.

“So,” Minhyuk says and claps once. Kihyun feels uncomfortably like one of his students and shakes the feeling off, having another pull from the miniature bottle and politely pretending not to notice as Hyungwon and Wonho sneak up to put a tiara on Kihyun’s head. “The concept of this bachelor party is… classiness.”

“I bet it took you _months _to come up with this,” Kihyun says drily.

“But! Classiness, in decreasing orders of magnitude over the course of the night,” Minhyuk continues, raising his voice to speak over Kihyun. “We’re starting here, with wine tasting.”

“Then why did you ply me with this glorified cough syrup?” Kihyun complains and tosses the bottle aside, clearly feeling silly now that he’s so unencumbered for the last time until he disposes of his husband just as easily as this bottle, but Shownu catches it before it can hit the stone floor. Kihyun hopes to God that’s not symbolic of anything. 

“We’re not getting drunk here, you understand,” Minhyuk says, grabbing Kihyun’s arm before he can slither away and linking tightly with him at the elbows. “That wouldn’t be very classy, now, would it.”

“I hate themes,” Kihyun declares, and he’s had maybe five sips of schnapps, it really was a tiny bottle, but he’s more drunk on the _freedom _than anything else — he can be _mean, _he can have _fun, _he can _be himself. _For the last time before he takes matters into his own hands. The next time his friends are all gathered together like this, it’ll be at Changkyun’s funeral. 

“It’s not a theme, it’s a concept,” Minhyuk insists, leading the charge with Kihyun through the stone-floored foyer of the house to the large ballroom. “This isn’t even a vineyard, it’s an exclusive sommelier’s club. Very pricey. Very snooty. I had to write an essay to even get us in the door, and you should have seen how many zeroes the security deposit had.”

“Thanks, hon,” Kihyun says, relishing the sarcasm in his own tone. God, it’s been too long. Changkyun’s tepid enjoyment of Kihyun’s witticisms while watching a mid-grade romantic film is enough to tide Kihyun over sometimes, but he can feel himself strengthening with each unrestrained snip, each cutting remark, each epithet. And to think he wasn’t looking forward to his bachelor party!

“Who, me?”

Kihyun affixes him with a disgusted look. “My _fiancé._”

“Oh.” Minhyuk pouts. “You never gave _me _a cute pet name.”

“We never got engaged,” Kihyun says breezily. “Now bring me your finest wines.”

“Ah, but here’s the thing,” Hyungwon says, somehow appearing ahead of them even though he’d been walking behind. “You have a mission.”

“Jesus,” Kihyun says. “What is it.”

“This will be quite the challenge,” Shownu says, shaking his head with a fond smile on his face. “We’ve been training, but with very limited success.”

“The suspense is killing me, so someone please tell me before I run off into the mountains and never return,” Kihyun says, only half-joking and stumbling over Minhyuk’s feet when he walks too close and shoving him lightly out of the way. Minhyuk squeaks, but doesn’t fall over, just clings to Kihyun even harder, and Kihyun makes an irritated noise and gives up on the prospect of losing his leech for the night. 

Hyungwon clears his throat and gestures to the silk-gloved attendants standing by a long table along the back wall of the ballroom, lined with silver cloches like the hills of a miniature city. At his sign, they lift the cloches in unison, revealing mostly empty tiny glasses of wine, and upon closer inspection, Kihyun sees that the glasses are numbered. 

“Wow,” Kihyun says, exasperated. “I couldn’t just have a regular classy wine tasting? You’re making me play a fucking guessing game?”

“So you can definitively prove the superiority of your intellect, of course,” Minhyuk grins. 

Kihyun sighs, casts a critical eye over the selection, and detangles from Minhyuk so he can roll up his sleeves. “Get ready to be destroyed, bitches.”

“There he is,” Minhyuk cheers, clapping Kihyun on the back, and even Wonho, giggling, squeezes Kihyun’s arm affectionately as he scampers past them, heading right for the champagnes. “Do you want to know the rules, or…?”

“Some of these are cheap, and some of these are insanely expensive, right?” Kihyun says. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“No, but you’re getting hitched tomorrow!” Minhyuk sing-songs. Kihyun, in response, reaches for a glass of wine without looking — regular Minhyuk is bad enough, but premarital rambunctious Minhyuk? Intolerable. 

“Should I keep score?” Shownu offers kindly. 

“You’re not playing?” Wonho gasps as though personally offended. “But we have to defend our honor as a rosé household!”

Shownu is a far better man than Kihyun must be, because he shows no desire to throw Wonho through a window for exposing his rather embarrassing wine preferences so casually. “I can keep score _and_ play,” he explains, and although they’re on opposite ends of the table now, they smile at each other so sweetly, and Kihyun looks away.

“I don’t have to guess the _type _of wine, right? Just pick out which one is the crown jewel of the collection?” Kihyun says. “Also, what do I get when I win?”

“When!” Minhyuk repeats with a snort. “Hyungwon, hold me back!”

“You get glory when you win,” Hyungwon says. “In the Humpty Dumpty sense.”

“A nice knock-down argument? I can have that any time,” Kihyun scoffs, although he really can’t, not these days, not anymore. “No, I want a real prize.”

“You already won the best prize,” Wonho sighs, because of course he does. 

Kihyun physically cannot take this, but at least there’s wine. The attendants suggest he starts on the left, so start on the left he does, and over the course of the next forty-five minutes he loses _spectacularly_, to _Wonho _of all people. Despite all Kihyun’s loud, bitter protestations about the calibre of wine he drinks these days, you unenlightened fools can’t even _imagine _what Changkyun casually orders for us to have with our lunches, he somehow mistakes a 1947 St-Emilion for dollar-store swill, then sings the praises of two-buck chuck directly after sipping on a — retroactively — very lovely Viognier. It’s almost like he’s doing it on purpose, but for once, he’s not. Hyungwon takes half a sip of each and declares them all just rotten grapes, in the end. Shownu is fantastic at the reds, but not good at all at the whites, and Wonho is the undisputed king, especially when it comes to the bubblies. As for Minhyuk, he’s the gamemaster, far more interested in sabotaging Kihyun by trying to feed him Marcona almonds between samples, making all kinds of faces while Kihyun talks his way through his thought process for declaring something a “classy” or a “nasty” (a rhyme that tortured could only have come from the abomination that is the rare, but very powerful Wonho-Minhyuk coalition), and disagreeing as vehemently as possible with his verdict than in trying to reach any kind of victory for himself. Against all odds, Kihyun is having fun. It’s not particularly classy, but it’s what he needed. He doesn’t even mind the presence of Shownu, who normally makes him so self-conscious. What does Kihyun have to lose, after all? Other than this game, that is. But that’s a lost cause. He slams a microscopic glass of white and swears on his life that it’s a pre-war vintage, then is politely informed that this is just slightly spoiled grape juice. Were Kihyun still in college, still unencumbered by the future of Changkyun, he’d spit it all over Minhyuk as thanks, but as it is, he chokes it down, then leans against Hyungwon, laughing hoarsely and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, snapping his fingers to get the attendant to bring him some water to cleanse his palate.

“I haven’t seen you like this in a long time,” Hyungwon says, not looking down at Kihyun, eyes still on the game as Shownu and Minhyuk debate the identity of their current wine selection. “Are you okay?”

“Like what?” Kihyun says, immediately on-guard and offended. Hyungwon never asks if he’s okay, or vice versa. They just assume they’re fine until one or both of them end up in a hospital with an upper respiratory infection. So if he’s asking, Kihyun must be seriously acting strange, and he pulls away from him, starting to reel himself back in. Evidently he went too far. “I’m just a little tipsy.”

Hyungwon shakes his head very slowly. “No. You know what I mean.”

Kihyun does know what he means. By the table, Minhyuk guesses it’s a classy, Shownu disagrees that it’s a nasty, and the attendant tells them that they’d accidentally picked two different wines and are yet both still wrong, but Kihyun doesn’t smile along, doesn’t laugh. “I’m getting fucking married tomorrow,” he explains, quiet so nobody overhears. “It’s a lot to handle. Sue me for having fun.”

Hyungwon hums, pensive. “And this is what you want?”

Something deep in Kihyun’s chest freezes in half-fear, half-desperation, and all the while Wonho is expertly identifying a pale pink wine as an exquisite vintage, then giggling radiantly and asking the attendant to write down the name of the wine so he can buy some to take home with him. But Kihyun is miles away. He’s in their new home in Bronxville — they hadn’t had time to move everything in before they left, but when they get back, it’ll all have been set up for them in their absence, as if by magic. He’s in his apartment in Chelsea, 300 miserable square feet, Jesus Christ, how did he live like that? How? He’s in his parents’ house, bedroom completely undecorated just in case his mother saw something hanging up and asked him why he thought it was acceptable to knock holes in their walls just so he could display his pictures. He’s anywhere but here. _Help me, _he wants to say, suddenly wants to hold onto Hyungwon, who just might understand, who just might know what to do, hold on for dear life and beg, _help me, help me, get me out, please just fucking help me before it’s too late—_

“Of course,” Kihyun smiles, light, enamored. “What can I say? He’s the one.”

“So I’ve heard,” Hyungwon says. He looks out over the room again, shrugs lazily. “Never thought I’d see the day, honestly.”

Kihyun bristles quite genuinely, that bit of rudeness sufficient to shock his system back to normalcy. “What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

“You’re not the marrying type,” Hyungwon explains. “Didn’t think you’d find the right guy, and I didn’t think it would last. But here you are.”

“Here I fucking am,” Kihyun agrees, eyes starting to narrow. “Is _this _your toast? This is how you support me as I embark on this new chapter of my life? Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“I’m trying to say I’m happy for you, too,” Hyungwon starts, but Kihyun’s frown is deepening and he steps away. “I’m surprised, but this is a good thing, I—”

“I get it,” Kihyun snaps. “Tell you what, you can come to our vow renewal in fifty years, _then _we’ll see who’s surprised. Mark your calendar right now.”

“Aw, are you fighting?” Wonho calls, a displeased moue on his face. “Not tonight, play nice, come on. Who’s winning? Kihyun, isn’t it your turn?”

Kihyun nods tensely and steps forward to take his turn, and doesn’t look back even when he hears Hyungwon’s frustrated exhale. The next round, Kihyun is no longer smiling, and he takes a mouthful of the wine and calls it nasty before he’s even fully let it sink into his tongue. He’s right. He loses the game anyway. Wonho’s prize for his victory is a fairly impressive gift certificate, which he tries to bestow upon Kihyun, but Kihyun turns it down. The tiara they put him in is giving him a headache, and he looks away when Hyungwon tries to make eye contact. Great. And just after he’d gotten comfortable again, too, after the indignities of the rehearsal, Minhyuk’s speech. Stupid. If there’s anything this year has taught him, it’s that he can never get too comfortable. Not even with— but there’s no use crying over spilled wine. 

Back into the car, on to the next destination. Kihyun takes out his phone, opens the Find Friends application, chews his lower lip as he waits for it to refresh, to show him that little dot that represents Changkyun. It’s only been an hour and a half since they parted ways — where has Jooheon taken him? Kihyun doesn’t have enough signal here for the app to triangulate Changkyun’s location, it keeps blinking and reloading, taunting him, and maybe Changkyun turned the feature off, maybe he doesn’t want Kihyun to know where he is, maybe he and Jooheon are leaving right now, Kihyun’s golden sacrificial lamb taken from him before he had the chance to lead him to the slaughter, and — the app loads, and the pulsing blue dot of Changkyun shines bright and true and three miles away, and Kihyun rushes to zoom in to see where, exactly, he is, but then a clawlike hand snatches Kihyun’s phone away, and Minhyuk just laughs in the face of Kihyun’s furious protestations.

“You can’t text him!” Minhyuk insists, passing the phone to Wonho, who placidly passes it to Shownu, who tucks it away. “Jesus, you’ll see him tomorrow! _Gawd_, you’re so clingy.”

Kihyun’s immediate instinct is to throttle, but that won’t do him any good, as satisfying as it might be. “I’m not clingy, I’m _worried_ about him, he’s going, like, spelunking,” he mutters. 

“Jooheon’s taking care of him,” Minhyuk says as though that’s supposed to _help, _when that’s _exactly _what Kihyun’s worried about.

“It’s so sweet but so sad that he only has one person here supporting him,” Wonho says, his head leaned on Shownu’s shoulder. Fucking lightweight — for his size, for his build, that amount of wine was enough to get him tipsy? Either that, or he must be very nervous, but Kihyun can’t fathom what reason _he _has to be nervous. Kihyun is the one with the whole weight of the world on his shoulders, and everyone is trying their absolute damndest to make him shrug. “Jooheon seems so great, though.”

“I got his whole life story last night, it’s crazy,” Minhyuk says, stretching his legs across the car seats to put his feet in Hyungwon’s lap. “He couldn’t even tell me about his job, it’s all classified.”

“Is that so? He told _me_ plenty,” Hyungwon says, which is most certainly a lie to get a rise out of Minhyuk, but Kihyun is pissed at both of them and ignores their antics, sliding to get closer to Wonho and Shownu instead. He immediately realizes this had been a mistake, because they both bloom into infinitely fond, respectful smiles, and he is forced to mirror one in response, leaning back against the seat to get comfortable while he still can.

“I guess he doesn’t have _only _one person,” Wonho adds thoughtfully. “Like, yes, he doesn’t have his parents anymore, poor thing. But now he has you, Kihyun. And all of us! But especially you! You’re his new family! Oh—”

And there he goes again, lip quivering, eyelashes clumping together shockingly quickly. Like a wind-up toy. Kihyun makes an approximation of a soothing noise while Shownu puts his arm around Wonho’s shoulders — suddenly so slim and slight, when compared to his own — and hugs him. “And it sounds like Kihyun has him, too, right? I’ve heard a few stories about your ex-boyfriends,” Shownu says with an apologetic smile. 

Damn, but he knows his way around Wonho; the distraction works, and he’s effusive again in moments, wiping at his eyes and delighted to talk shit about enemies of yore. “They were all so lame!” Wonho says, shaking his head. “Total buzzkills. But Changkyun is fun! Isn’t he fun?”

“Oh, are we talking shit about Kihyun’s exes?” Minhyuk says, drawn like a fruit fly to a rotting melon. “Top 5 men on my kill list, I’ll tell you that.”

“They were not that bad,” Kihyun says stiffly. 

“You’re right, I’m so sorry,” Minhyuk says, all innocent, all but batting his eyelashes, hold for better comedic timing, then the finale— “They were worse!”

Somehow, this conversation lasts them all the way to the hotel where they’ll be spending the rest of the evening and night. It’s so _nice _not to have to thank the driver like Kihyun has taken to doing so he looks kinder in front of Changkyun. Kihyun just vacates the car without looking back and struts his way into the hotel, accompanied by his henchmen, and he wishes he could pick one, either happy with the circumstances or generally disapproving, because as it is he’s getting whiplash, but it’s hardly his fault. When faced with the relative opulence of the room that’s been set up specifically for this event, Kihyun is much more forgiving of Minhyuk’s trespasses — not Hyungwon’s, though — and allows for the tiara to go back on, _and _even allows a commemorative photo of the whole group, taken by a pleasantly obsequious waiter. 

“So is _this _where we get drunk?” Kihyun inquires, and Minhyuk snaps his fingers twice, resulting in the lowering of a large screen on one side of the room and a simultaneous dimming of the lights. “Oh, _no. _Now what?”

“A trip down memory lane,” Minhyuk declares quaveringly. “That’s classy, right?”

Thank fuck Changkyun isn’t here. Seeing all of Kihyun’s college photos, those dark days. He was always so manic, so _embarrassing _with his sweatervests and pea coats and black shoes, shined all by himself every other morning to his roommates’ despair. The slideshow is badly made but intentionally so, Comic Sans and swipe transitions, and Kihyun pulls his shoulders up to his ears and wishes he could crumble into dust so he wouldn’t have to endure the rest of this. There are drinks, there’s music, Wonho’s teary again, Shownu is chuckling along, Hyungwon and Minhyuk are cackling, and Kihyun ends up covering his face with his hands and peeking through his fingers, taking deep breaths into his palms. How different everything was when these photos were taken. He’ll never live like that again, and by the time the slideshow is coming to an end, he’s almost convinced himself fully that that’s a good thing.

“And look what we got for you!” Minhyuk announces, standing and activating the waiters again with another clap of his hands. A flurry of movement, and the doors open so they can wheel a large sheet-covered construction into the room. Kihyun, wary, watches this, and when the sheet is pulled down to reveal a large dartboard, his eyebrows shoot up.

“You _didn’t.”_

“We did!” Minhyuk grins. “This is _the _actual one! I’ve been in contact with the Student Engagement Office for months, and Changkyun finally managed to name a number they liked to give it up _and _ship it over here—”

“Changkyun paid for this?” Kihyun interrupts with a frown. Obviously he paid for all of it, and Kihyun tugs at the collar of his shirt to get a bit more air, spontaneously warm, but Changkyun _knows _about this? How much? Did Minhyuk send him the slideshow for pre-approval? Jesus. So much for Kihyun’s final night of isolation — Changkyun has stuck his fingers in each of Kihyun’s pies, clearly. 

“Don’t worry about the logistics, just… dive into the nostalgia,” Minhyuk beckons. “Remember the first time you met Hyungwon and you almost took his nose off with the two-ounce steel-tipped because he was standing too close?”

“He’d have been fine,” Kihyun says, but maybe it’s time for a rematch, since Hyungwon has decided to act up. But Minhyuk did a good thing by making tonight all about Kihyun’s competitive spirit; it leaves little time for him to worry about anything else. Not that he’s worried. He’s not. He has a steel-tipped dart in one hand and a strong drink in the other, no idiot morrow-husband anywhere in sight. The alcohol is starting to hit him properly now, but in a different way than it usually does — something about France, maybe. But Kihyun’s aim is no less sharp when he’s liquor-warmed and loose, and although Shownu is a serious challenger and even Wonho, against all odds, manages to land a decent shot or two, Kihyun’s still got it. Maybe he was more himself in college than he’d ever been before, than he’s been since. And he almost feels like _that _himself again, with the same friends, the same fucking dartboard, the same music playing over the speakers, it’s nearly enough to take him back. But then Wonho’s laugh will ring out, a peal of tinkling bells, and he’ll drape himself over his husband’s back and moan about how bad he is at this game, and Hyungwon checks his phone to confirm nothing’s on fire back at the office, and Minhyuk — when Minhyuk turns his head to the side, screeching as he disputes a point, Kihyun thinks he might see a dappled patch of grey hair, which is _ridiculous, _Minhyuk is less than a month older than Kihyun, and if _he’s _going grey then Kihyun must be next, and if Kihyun goes grey, there’s no coming back. Kihyun won’t be the old man with unnaturally perfect hair, he won’t. He has another drink. Minhyuk summons a karaoke machine. Kihyun is no longer enjoying himself. Changkyun had expressed concern, at the start of this planning process, that maybe the rehearsal _and _the bachelor parties were too much for one night, especially the eve of the wedding, but Kihyun had dismissed that as ‘no big deal,’ surely he could handle it, they’re his closest friends, after all. But it is too much. The only people Kihyun has ever been able to abide, and here he is, beginning to hate them. 

“I’m going to go change into pajamas,” he declares, standing unsteadily from his ‘bachelor throne’ — and not that he minds being placed on a pedestal, but did it have to have such an idiotic name? — and reaching for his phone to check on Changkyun before remembering, belatedly, that it was taken from him, and he’s not even sure if Shownu still has it or not. Fucking hell. “If I’m not back in ten minutes…”

“Come scoop you out like an escargot out of its shell?” Minhyuk suggests.

“Send a flare?” Shownu adds.

“Call the cops,” Hyungwon intones.

“Join you for a slumber party?” Wonho says, closing out the worst string of sentences Kihyun has ever heard in his life, and he rolls his eyes, waving a hand to dismiss them all.

“Just leave me there to die,” he says, then finds his meandering way out of the ballroom to the nearest grand staircase.

This hotel is awfully quiet. Kihyun wouldn’t be surprised if Changkyun had booked the whole thing completely, and as small as it is, can’t be more than ten rooms total, that’s still a… nice gesture. Kihyun’s bag is already in his room, and he’d gotten the key from one of the waiters about midway through darts, so he follows the hallways, trailing one hand along the wall to stay steady, until he finds his room. Number one, of course. He’s so much more tired than he’d thought now that he’s alone, but he can still hear the throb of the bass from the karaoke going on downstairs, and it’s so tempting to just crawl into bed and stay there, alone, in peace, just one last day before he has to face his responsibilities, one last night to just be _himself_— he turns on the room light and opens his overnight bag, finding his silk pajamas and starting to peel out of his current outfit to change. Someone, probably Wonho, is doing an ABBA song, Kihyun can’t identify it without hearing the words, and he hums along very quietly as he automatically, methodically, folds the clothes of the day and slips into his pajamas. His head is buzzing. His limbs feel heavy. He’s alone, and this is what he wanted, but it’s not _quiet, _there’s still so much noise, the music from the ballroom and the faint flicker of one of the lights overhead, and then a small metallic clang, then a mumble from far away. Kihyun frowns, pausing in his journey to buttoning up his pajama top. He waits, listens, and — sure enough, there it is again, a little _plink _coming from the direction of the window. 

“What the fuck?” Kihyun mutters, cautiously approaching, and this time the noise is muffled, like whatever small projectile being thrown had missed and hit the wall, not the glass. Kihyun draws back the translucent curtain so he can see outside, two floors down to the ground, and he squints to see through the dark, but by now he’s learned him, possibly knows the back of Changkyun’s hand better than his own, and even hidden in shadow, even bending down to find another pebble to throw at his window to catch his attention, an indistinct and night-blurred shape, barely human at all, Kihyun knows it’s him.

Shit, he’ll take Kihyun’s eye out if Kihyun opens up. Kihyun starts to smile, and the next time Changkyun looks up, small stone in hand, Kihyun waves frantically to let him know he’s seen him. Is he alone? Kihyun’s heart does something strange, but— no, Jooheon had just been hidden by foliage, he steps out to be by his side. But Changkyun and Kihyun are beaming at each other, and Changkyun mouths something, makes a few confusing gestures, and Kihyun mouths back, “Stay there, I’ll come to you,” points down, blows him kisses, then shuts the curtains. His pulse is roaring. Slippers — provided by the hotel, somewhere, velvet-lined and comfortable, there they are, and Kihyun shoves his feet in and slips and slides down the hallway and races to the stairs, catches himself on the bannister but only barely. If Kihyun’s side of the wedding party sees him, either of them, that’s all the magic gone, but Kihyun holds his breath and stumbles to the first floor, any creak from the sadly low-quality floors covered by the increasingly loud karaoke going on. He very nearly gets lost, too, this place is bigger than it looks, but then— then there he is, waiting in the front entryway, and Kihyun flies to him, practically launches himself into his arms, holds onto him so tightly that they both stagger and Changkyun has to catch them by bracing back on his other leg.

“I missed you,” Changkyun explains, his breath hot against Kihyun’s neck where he’s buried in Kihyun’s shoulder, and Kihyun makes a small, overwhelmed noise and squeezes him tighter, arms flung about his waist, nestling into him until the material of Changkyun’s shirt subsumes the world around him and he can’t see the faintest hint of light. 

“I missed you, too,” Kihyun breathes, burrowing in deeper. He holds Changkyun tight until his breath goes shallow — too tight, and Kihyun still doesn’t let go. “How did you know?”

“Felt it,” Changkyun says.

Kihyun closes his eyes and lets Changkyun hold him. He has the oddest urge to press his face into the hollow at the base of Changkyun’s throat and tell him about what Hyungwon said, complain about how nobody believes in him, in them, about how fucking small that makes him feel, for all Minhyuk’s talk about how Kihyun is wrong regarding being hard to love — where’d he even get that from, anyway? Fucking bullshit. Kihyun knows he’s irresistible, if he plays his cards right, and he may as well be an international poker champion by now. Changkyun’s palm runs up and down his back, settles in his hair, and Kihyun draws away from him barely enough to be able to kiss him. 

“I love you,” Kihyun says between kisses. “You weren’t having fun?”

“I was, but I missed you,” Changkyun shrugs. He evidently doesn’t see the extent of Kihyun’s condition, and— there is no condition, Kihyun reminds himself, he’s _fine. _The worst he’s endured tonight is his friends being annoying, and this was supposed to be a night just for _him_— who the fuck invited Changkyun to come party-crash, anyway? Just like that, Kihyun feels sicker than before, but kisses Changkyun again regardless, then just nuzzles their cheeks together to feel the softness of his skin. “How’s yours going?”

“Oh, it’s been crazy,” Kihyun says. “I’m a little drunk and a _lot _exhausted. It’s been fun, but…”

Changkyun is smiling. He presses their foreheads together and holds Kihyun at his waist, Kihyun’s hands rising to curl around the back of his neck. “You think they’ll notice if we… don’t come back?” he whispers, conspiratorial and convivial.

“Yes,” Kihyun answers immediately. “But do you think we’ll care?”

Changkyun’s smile widens. “Good point.”

“What about Jooheon?” Kihyun remembers, as much as he wishes he could forget. “Is he okay with just getting ditched?”

Changkyun pulls away and looks over his shoulder, but Jooheon is nowhere to be seen — and the sounds from the karaoke room are louder than before, he must have just joined them. Well, fine. They all deserve each other. Changkyun shrugs a little, tilts his head to the side puppy-cute, and Kihyun kisses him on his insouciant mouth — no absinthe aftertaste, thank _fuck _— and takes him by the hand. 

“My hero,” Kihyun says softly, his smile coming back. “Do you happen to be busy? See, I have this big room all to myself, and I get _so _cold at night…”

Changkyun breaks into giggles, and Kihyun rushes to silence him, pressing in for a kiss to keep him quiet so he doesn’t give away their position. Once he’s satisfied that Changkyun won’t spoil everything by making too much noise, he pulls back, and uses his loose hold on Changkyun’s hand to lead him up the same way he’d come. Changkyun seems very interested in Kihyun’s only partly-buttoned pajama top, and Kihyun has to bat his touch away more than once, biting his lip very hard to hold back his pleased snickering. He _felt _it — what the fuck is that supposed to mean? Minhyuk must have texted Jooheon that Kihyun had gone up for the night, and then they must have come over right away; Kihyun knows there’s another decent hotel in town, a four-minute walk from this one, he did his research. There’s nothing to feel. Kihyun had been fine, then annoyed, and now he’s even more annoyed because Changkyun is disrupting his solitude. They’re kissing as they push into Kihyun’s room, but once they make it to the bed and Kihyun is straddling his thighs, they both stop and just look at each other, catching their breaths and thinking.

“The responsible thing to do,” Changkyun says, slow, “would be to go to bed now. Then we’ll be well-rested in the morning, and not too hungover, or at least not too bad. We might even have time for brunch before I have to exit stage left.” He gestures to the window, and Kihyun snorts a soft laugh.

“That would be very responsible,” Kihyun agrees. They consider each other, and Kihyun pets over the back of Changkyun’s head while his other hand moves around to thumb at Changkyun’s lower lip. “But are we really that kind of couple?”

Changkyun’s eyes take on a certain lively sharpness, and he turns his head to the side, kissing the pad of Kihyun’s thumb. “I don’t know. Are we?”

Kihyun watches him for another moment, then plants his hands against his shoulders and pushes him down to the bed. “No,” he decides for them both, then bends over him to press their lips together, hard and adoring as Changkyun smiles almost too much for them to be able to kiss. 

He’d gone too far earlier, caging Changkyun in against the door and hurting his wrists. Changkyun will allow him anything, that much is obvious, but this is — this is an important night, a crucial time in Kihyun’s life, and instead of taking any more risks, he’d better stick to what he knows, what he knows gets Changkyun off. The delicate way he moans when Changkyun kisses his neck, the shudder of his thighs parting when Changkyun slips his hand low to stroke him to full hardness. Changkyun wants to suck him, of course he does, predictable to a fault, and Kihyun pets his hair and breathlessly praises him the whole time, I love you, I love you, that feels good, that feels so fucking good, as Changkyun uses _witchcraft _or something to make Kihyun come so hard he sees stars, just from his lips around the tip of his cock and two fingertips pressing blunt against his hole. Kihyun licks himself out of Changkyun’s mouth and gives Changkyun his fist to fuck into, rutting uncoordinated and needy and lazy all at once, and Changkyun is trying to be quiet, Kihyun can tell, he doesn’t want to draw too much attention to their room just in case the party downstairs starts wrapping up, but his typically lush, decadent noises are hushed in Kihyun’s throat, muffled by his constant wet little kisses, and he goes so stiff when he comes, then gasps from the effort of holding himself back, gasps until Kihyun tumbles him over so Kihyun is on top and he can kiss that trembling mouth, keep stroking him though Changkyun is twitchy and oversensitive, finally stops and just splays his hand out over the come-wet expanse of his lower stomach and curls up on top of him. Kihyun is marrying this man tomorrow. Kihyun has been shackled to this man for so long. And what does he have to show for it? His forehead is damp with sweat and Kihyun kisses him right in the heart of his brow, holds him still with his clean hand on his chin so he can kiss his eyelids, his cheekbones, the catlike arch of his upper lip, his neck, and all the while Changkyun is very still, just breathing, letting Kihyun have his way. Finally Kihyun has kissed his fill, and he slides down to pillow himself on Changkyun’s shoulder, close enough that he can feel his throbbing pulse. 

“Are you ready for tomorrow?” Kihyun breathes. In no rush to clean, despite the sticky-sweetness of their bodies pressed so close. The shower will still be there in five minutes, after all. He’s got nowhere else to be. “What time should we leave? You don’t actually have to go out of the window, babe.”

“I know,” Changkyun murmurs, his hand resting near the small of Kihyun’s back. “But we still have to get dressed. I’ll need to shave. So probably not too late.”

Kihyun makes to roll off of him so he can take Changkyun’s phone and set an alarm, but Changkyun stops him, the arm around his waist tightening as he makes a soft noise. Kihyun hesitates as requested, coming back for another kiss, and Changkyun mumbles, “Stay,” then takes Kihyun’s chin the same way Kihyun had taken his, thumb gripping into the softest part of an otherwise very spare, firm face. And then — and how the fuck did Kihyun not predict _this, _it’s the _most _Changkyun bullshit to pull — he returns the favor Kihyun had granted him, ghosting his kiss-plumped lips over Kihyun’s browbone, his cheeks, his jaw, his nose, the mole at the corner of his mouth, so reverent and slow, and Kihyun is about ready to vibrate out of his own skin by the time Changkyun is breathing Kihyun’s eyelids closed and kissing the fragile blue-pink veins threading up from his lashes. 

He’s got Kihyun trapped. So Kihyun figures he may as well stay there. They’ll shower tomorrow, it’s not like his friends will let them sleep in. The things Changkyun has made him do, has made him accept — it’s untenable. But Kihyun will have his own, soon. His time is coming. Kihyun falls asleep in Changkyun’s arms, head busy, mind full. The worst is over. Most of his work is done. Just a few practically insignificant little details left.

It’s cold the morning of Kihyun’s wedding. He’s in a haze from the moment he wakes. Cold in August — who’d have known? They shower. Separate. The teasing about Kihyun ditching his bachelor party to spend time with his future husband is minimal. Kihyun is all but girdled in flowers as he is led back to the château. Strictly kept from Changkyun until the moment of them uniting to walk down the aisle. He dresses, unassisted. But Minhyuk insists on re-folding his pocket square. The photographer, hovering nearby, clicks and clicks. 

Then the ceremony. Windows open, it’s still cold. Music, soft. The quiet sound of Wonho trying and failing to hide his tears. Changkyun by Kihyun’s side, arm through his arm. Their hands, linked. Kihyun repeats what he’s told to say. Moves when he’s told to move. Looks where he’s told to look. He tunes back in to hear Changkyun say, “Until death do us part.” Kihyun echoes. The rings are exchanged. Confetti, from somewhere, pops. They kiss. Click, click. Crying. Hugging. And that’s it.

By night, it’s still cold. Kihyun is full of champagne and wedding cake and very little else, and he’s lost the past few hours but from what he can glean, his body had a good time, kisses on the cheek permitted to absolutely everyone, including a visibly reluctant Jooheon and an embarrassed Shownu, and his hand has been gripped in Changkyun’s so tightly that the ring, a fine platinum band he spent weeks picking out himself, is leaving grooves in the skin of his finger. Changkyun looks shell-shocked, moon-struck, he’s been staring open-mouthed at Kihyun all day long like he can’t believe his luck, and whenever Kihyun catches him looking, he kisses him, so needless to say, there’s been an awful lot of kissing. But finally they’re alone, after a whole afternoon and evening of celebration, followed by the hoots and hollers of their friends as they go up the stairs to their suite, fingers seemingly tangled for good. Kihyun is _married. _Jooheon was Changkyun’s witness, and Minhyuk was Kihyun’s, and everybody waved bye-bye to the car rushing the marriage certificate to the airport to be mailed back home. Changkyun is smiling something awful, giddy, loopy, and Kihyun is, too, blushing furiously and covering his face with his other hand. And finally they’re outside of their door, and Kihyun turns their hands over so he can see the band glinting white on his finger, and Changkyun grins back at him, and there’s something in his eyes Kihyun doesn’t recognize — something new, something _confident, _and before Kihyun can look at it any longer, he leans in to kiss him, which guides them through the doorway and towards the bed. Just like they’d done yesterday, last night, but everything is different now. Changkyun is no longer just Kihyun’s mark, his cutesy little boyfriend, his bumbling well-meaning hapless idiot of a fiancé, he’s his _husband_. This whole time Kihyun has had such ownership over him, such dominion, but now, he belongs to Changkyun as much as Changkyun does to him, and all of a sudden, Kihyun is scared of him, standing trembling just within the threshold as Changkyun pulls away to take his hands. 

“Husband,” Changkyun says, and his voice is so low, rendering Kihyun motionless, held insect-weak by the amber of his gaze, and when Changkyun pulls lightly on his hands, Kihyun goes to him. He can’t conceal his shaking, but he doesn’t need to; Changkyun kisses him without acknowledgment, kisses him very nearly the same way he’d kissed Kihyun that first night they slept together, intense like a lifeline from a burning building but _slower, _searing deep through Kihyun’s veins and leaving him gasping, as though the trembling wasn’t enough. Changkyun knows just how Kihyun likes to be kissed — Kihyun can’t remember when Changkyun started kissing him _quite _like this, how the fuck he figured it out, but he can’t deny the benefits it’s brought him, being kissed so all-consumingly. Each time. Like Changkyun knows his deathday is coming, and how soon. He kisses Kihyun like it’s his last, like he _knows, _and Kihyun kisses back in holy confirmation, _soon, soon, soon._

Changkyun’s fingers undo the buttons of Kihyun’s shirt so delicately, but Kihyun doesn’t want him delicate. If they own each other, they may as well act like it. And yet the first touch of Changkyun’s fingertips against Kihyun’s bare skin makes him flinch again, weak all over, as though scalded, and he falters but Changkyun doesn’t let him go far, still so careful, even as he slides his left hand — the one with the ring, which shines even in the dim — down to slide over the front of Kihyun’s impeccably pressed trousers. 

Kihyun’s cock stirs to life immediately, and he’s still scared but where is he supposed to go but here? His hands move to grab Changkyun’s shoulders, holding him just as closely, and Changkyun makes a distant rumble of a noise, his tongue hot on the inside of Kihyun’s lower lip. Is Kihyun getting turned on because he has no choice, it’s their wedding night, he knows he’s supposed to get fucked, he’s been anticipating this for a year? Or is that all just Changkyun’s searching hands, the way he’s shaking, too, not from fear but from desire, from love, from longing? Longing, though Kihyun has hardly left his side since they met. Kihyun knows he’ll never get enough. But he can try, at least. He opens his mouth to Changkyun’s tongue and goes easily when Changkyun pulls him to the bed, and all he can hear is the slick sound of Changkyun kissing him, and outside, the rustling breeze, no birdsong. They’re the only two creatures alive, the world is just this room, the world is just Changkyun’s hands continuing their pilgrimage down Kihyun’s body to open his trousers, strip him bare. So perfectly-matched in size, the two of them, but still so different, Changkyun broad and so much more alive, looking golden and well-loved in the moonlight, Kihyun pallid marble in comparison. But Changkyun loves him, Changkyun runs his hands up his thighs and unites their bodies on the bed, Kihyun anticipating his motions and moving before Changkyun can urge him. Still trembling. It worsens when Changkyun touches him. His lips shake against Changkyun’s, so Changkyun kisses harder, spreads him open, there’s already lube prepared on the bed, and this’ll be over in no time at all, all Kihyun has to do is take it. 

His thighs are spread wide over Changkyun’s lap as Changkyun works him open on two fingers, and somehow Kihyun always thought _he’d _be the one topping on his wedding night but he’d rather die himself than make Changkyun stop. Changkyun keeps his fingers wet, verging on sloppy, curving into Kihyun at the perfect angle, while Kihyun bends over him, hands in his hair, mouth hot on Changkyun’s. He rocks back and forth to push his fingers in deeper, riding slow, and he wants his cock, he hasn’t had it in — God, maybe two weeks, they’ve been too busy with the planning and the travel and the wedding itself, and Kihyun had forgotten how much he loved it until it had been kept from him. He’d been quiet while they were kissing, but now that his shaking has subsided, he lets himself moan into Changkyun’s emotive mouth, rocks his dick against Changkyun’s stomach when he’s close enough, and Changkyun is still being so slow, so measured, Kihyun is the best of his life, the most precious, the most adored, and Changkyun is so careful not to hurt him. Kihyun has never been this venerated before. Every touch is amplified by the significance of this really being it, their wedding night, once and for all, and Kihyun’s moans are so much closer to whines than he ever lets them get. All his friends are downstairs, they all know _exactly _what Kihyun and Changkyun are doing right now, but instead of the thought making Kihyun cringe and quiet down, it just gets him hotter, makes his noises louder, until Changkyun _finally _gives him what he wants, strokes his cock with his lubed-up hand until it’s dripping, then starts to push inside.

Fuck. Kihyun’s mind has been appallingly cluttered the past few days, but as soon as Changkyun is stuffed inside, it goes _blank, _it’s so good, the pure raw physical pleasure of being stretched on Changkyun’s thick, perfect cock making Kihyun moan and drag his hands down Changkyun’s arms, desperate for more. Changkyun, as always, gives. Are they going to fuck all night? At this rate, Kihyun wouldn’t say no, if it’ll be like this every time. But maybe — maybe it could be _better, _and Kihyun closes his eyes and lets the beautiful mental images wash over him, Changkyun bound, Changkyun begging, Changkyun arched and helpless and even more at Kihyun’s mercy than he already is — Changkyun marked red by Kihyun’s love, bitten and bruised, Changkyun with tears in his eyes, Changkyun on the brink, Kihyun’s fingers too tight around his throat, Changkyun pleading permission even to _breathe_, and right now, Changkyun is moaning quietly into Kihyun’s shoulder, pressing soft and loving kisses to his collarbone. Changkyun is touching Kihyun like he’s something holy, and Kihyun is salivating over the thought of Changkyun offering himself up to be used, letting his jaw hang open, knelt at Kihyun’s feet, _waiting _for any absolution Kihyun will grant him, be it down his hungry throat or all across that arrogant face_. _

“That’s good?” Changkyun asks, breathless, low, because Kihyun must be moaning something remarkable, winding his hips up and down Changkyun’s dick, chasing the feeling, chasing his fantasy before Changkyun ruins it like he’s ruined everything else. Kihyun kisses him in reply, tongue-first, why doesn’t Changkyun ever kiss the way he sucks cock? Can’t Changkyun disrespect him, just once? Changkyun angles his hips better and presses tight against Kihyun’s prostate, always hits it just how Kihyun needs it, and Kihyun throws his head back and bounces down to take him harder, drive him in deeper, until he forgets anything that’s _not _this, Changkyun filling him so completely, to the brim, very nearly everything Kihyun needs. Changkyun’s hands are so hot on his hips, on his ass, guiding him, and Kihyun pulls at his hair and sobs his adoration into Changkyun’s mouth. 

The adrenaline from the ceremony must be keeping Kihyun going — he rides Changkyun until Changkyun can’t hold back any longer, his eyes blown wide and cosmic as he comes inside, and it’s a parody, a mirror image, Changkyun spilling Kihyun over onto his back, knelt between his pushed-up legs, to stroke him to completion. How little things have changed since that first time of theirs. Kihyun is so much stronger now than he’d been then. 

They don’t fuck _all _night, but it’s a near thing. Two more rounds, their union thoroughly consummated, until they pass out. Kihyun has never been the type to even consider “waiting until marriage” a tenable option — life is so fucking miserable, why deny himself a chance at pleasure? But as he falls asleep, he can’t help the depraved chill he gets at imagining an alternate world where Changkyun, virginal, never-touched, comes apart under his hands for the very first time on this their wedding night, after months of waiting and wanting and heavy petting — the sounds he’d make, fuck. And he must have a dream to that effect, because when he wakes, he’s hard, restless in the soft golden light of the morning after, and, as luck would have it, Changkyun is _right _there. Always this has been a torment, the constant misery of his presence, but Kihyun can’t deny that the easy access lifestyle is not without some obscure appeal. 

“Good morning, husband,” Kihyun murmurs, sliding his cool hand over the small of Changkyun’s back. “Are you awake?”

No response. Kihyun pets him there again, then repeats, only satisfied when Changkyun makes a faint noise into his pillow, hips pushing down against the bed. He’s warm, pliant, touching him and teasing him is the simplest thing. Kihyun sidles up closer, molds their bodies together, fits his mouth to the silky skin below Changkyun’s ear and kisses him wet. 

Changkyun shivers awake. “Kihyun,” he mumbles. “What—”

“Shh,” Kihyun breathes. “You don’t have to talk, my love. I’m just saying good morning.”

“Good morning,” Changkyun dutifully repeats, barely intelligible, his head lolling further back to grant Kihyun more room for his kisses. He must know what Kihyun is after, because he wriggles just enough so his back is fitted to Kihyun’s chest, and Kihyun’s smile curves into his neck, his hand sliding over Changkyun’s now-exposed belly, the weak animal heart of him completely vulnerable to Kihyun’s touch. When Changkyun wakes him up like this, rare but still a possibility, Kihyun always hates it, squirms away from his touches and clings desperately to any last shreds of sleep. But Changkyun is so willing, so ready, absolutely Kihyun’s for the taking, so Kihyun has no choice but to take.

He kisses the side of Changkyun’s neck, nipping and sucking, until Changkyun’s breath is tight in his throat and his cock, already half-hard from morning when Kihyun began his journey, is stiff against his stomach. A quiet helpless _oh, oh, Kihyun _is his refrain as Kihyun slips his hand between his thighs, strokes him where he’s softest, and Kihyun knows what he wants to do to Changkyun, even though he’s not as good at it as Changkyun is. Changkyun’s barely conscious, anyway, it’s not like he’ll be picky about the level of _technique _the tongue in his ass is displaying. Kihyun guides him onto his front, his careful, loving hands moving his head to angle his chin to the side so he can breathe, propped up on pillows — what good would he be to Kihyun if he accidentally smothers _himself _to death before they can even merge finances? — then moves down the bed, spreads Changkyun’s legs, smiles fondly at the picture Changkyun makes, then leans in and gets to work.

It’s close enough to his dream that he’s mostly satisfied. Each press of Kihyun’s tongue, each slick glide that pushes within, has Changkyun shuddering, quivering all over, and the noises, Changkyun’s sex noises are always outrageous, but in the morning he has even less control over them than he usually exercises, so he’s nothing but whimpers and whines, hips jumping under Kihyun’s mouth, fingers clutching uselessly in the sheets. Weren’t they supposed to do things today? Plans, maybe, with the whole wedding party. Kihyun distantly remembers booking a tour of the area. Somehow it doesn’t seem very important right this second, because he pushes one, then two fingers inside Changkyun, his hole as pliant to Kihyun as the rest of him, stretches them apart, licks between, steadfastly avoids Changkyun’s cock even though it’s right there, so clearly straining for touch. Kihyun is heavy between his legs, too, and at this rate, he’s starting to think they might not need lube — how long has it been, fifteen minutes? Twenty? Having taken a leaf out of Changkyun’s book, he’s eating him out filthy, tongue and spit and mess, to the point it’s dripping down, no doubt adding to the sensations leaving Changkyun incessantly twitching. Kihyun could just push in, Changkyun would welcome him, and the thought must unintentionally invigorate Kihyun’s efforts because Changkyun’s noises reach a fever pitch, his poor stupid easily-bidden husband, and his body winds tight with pleasure as he comes. 

Kihyun is disappointed. He’d thought that would last longer. He gentles Changkyun down, licks over him lighter, sweeter, pulls his fingers out. Changkyun shudders. “Will you fuck me, too?” he asks, always so hoarse in the mornings, even more so after an orgasm or two. 

“You read my mind, sweetheart,” Kihyun murmurs, kisses the back of his thigh, starts to pull away to sit up, adjust their position so he’s not doing all the work yet again, but then there’s a knock on the door and Changkyun goes rigid and unhappy. 

Oh, right, the plans. “Stay there,” Kihyun instructs gently, pets over him, one last kiss to the soft back of his hip, then stands, grabbing a robe from by the bed and tying it loosely around himself. When he’d booked everything, he remembers better now, he’d been fairly excited about exploring historic Saint-Lizier, but, well. Changkyun, behind him in bed, is still whimpering, and Kihyun suspects he may have started touching himself, just to take the edge off and keep himself going until Kihyun’s return. With company at the door! Shameless. Kihyun hides a smile, then opens the door just enough to see who’s outside, keeping Changkyun concealed.

“Morning, lovebird,” Minhyuk says, waggling his eyebrows, and thank fuck he wisely knows better than to ask how last night went. “Tour? We’re all ready to go, they’re hustling us all into the Land Rovers right now. Chop chop, come on, or we’ll miss the change bells, and those only happen every—”

“Changkyun’s not feeling well,” Kihyun interrupts, with enough smug sweetness to make it exceedingly obvious that it’s a lie. “We’ll have to pass.”

Minhyuk scowls at him. “You _trollop_.”

“I have to tend to him!” Kihyun protests. “But you all go have fun!”

“I knew this would happen,” Minhyuk sighs. “We should have bet on it.”

Kihyun shrugs, then starts closing the door. “Send our sincere apologies.”

“Changkyun,” Minhyuk calls past Kihyun’s shoulder while he still can. “Be sure he lets you eat! Stay hydrated!”

“I’m fine, thanks,” comes Changkyun’s weak voice in response, and Kihyun’s smile is irrepressible as he finally shuts the door in Minhyuk’s grouchy face. 

“Did you miss me?” he croons, casting off his robe so he can come back over to the bed and find Changkyun exactly as he’d imagined, still on his front and nestling into the pillows but with a hand down low, playing with his cock while he waits. “Do you want it that bad, baby?”

“Even worse,” Changkyun rasps, his eyes closed. “Please fuck me.”

It’s rare, but Kihyun loves it dearly when he begs like that. He grabs the lube, gets on the bed, pushes Changkyun’s legs open wider, kneels between them. Changkyun’s skin has a different glow in France, or maybe, like Hyungwon had said, it’s just sun exposure. But Hyungwon is the absolute last person Kihyun wants to think about with his husband stretched open and wanting, splayed in supplication in front of him, so he just thinks about Changkyun instead, spills lube abundantly over his cock and strokes himself without care for any drips landing on Changkyun’s skin — he seems to like it, anyway, mewling out helplessly in anticipation each time and shivering. Kihyun aches. He’s pushing inside in another moment, going slow so he doesn’t hurt him, and it’s not the best angle but it’s always better when he can’t quite see Changkyun’s whole face, when Changkyun isn’t staring directly at him with more adoration than the rest of the world has ever seen. He opens up so easily for Kihyun, pulls him in so hungrily, and Kihyun can’t hold back a groan at the feeling of Changkyun so hot and wet around him. God, Changkyun never shuts up, and for once it’s welcome as opposed to a nuisance, his wounded creature sounds, like he can’t stop himself — he probably has no idea how much noise he makes. Kihyun won’t ever tell him, for fear of him getting self-conscious and toning it down. 

Kihyun may not be as good at oral as Changkyun is, but he’s better at fucking. Even at this angle, even with Changkyun near-mindblowingly good around him, he starts rolling his hips deep and true, seeking out his own pleasure as much as he’s trying to maintain Changkyun’s. Kihyun slides a slim hand under Changkyun’s front to lift him up, just slightly, and in the meantime bends down, kisses open-mouthed along his nape, his shoulder, all without breaking rhythm. Every point of contact gentle, careful, loving. _I’d never hurt you,_ is what his touches say. _You’re safe with me._

Changkyun is wholly under his spell, but Kihyun isn’t much better off. It’s like he’s drunk on it, more and more mindless the longer he fucks him, but he can’t stop, wouldn’t want to even if he could. He moves to roll them onto their sides, not pulling out, so he can hold Changkyun closer, and this is even less comfortable — he’s got an arm stuck underneath Changkyun’s body, but the rest of him feels so _good _that he can’t bring himself to care — but it’s worth it, Changkyun a quivering mess in his arms, so much worse off than Kihyun had been last night. Good. But somewhere in between licking the back of Changkyun’s ear and driving his cock into him, twisting just right to make Changkyun cry out, Kihyun forgets about the power play of it all, just enjoys his nubile, willing body, how responsive he is, how grateful. Kihyun fits inside him so perfectly, and he always prides himself on his stamina, but Changkyun makes it challenging, sometimes, to hold back. 

So Kihyun had better do something else, find any distraction, any way to stave off his finish. When Changkyun is sleepy like this, he’ll allow anything — not that he usually won’t, of course — and so it’s easy to pull out, then move Changkyun onto his back, positioning him exactly how Kihyun wants him, he’s never been anything but a sex doll come to life. Kihyun admires him for a moment, so flushed, eyes barely focusing, he can hardly move except to keep his legs obscenely wide, he’s such a slut. All he knows is pleasure. Kihyun will show him so much more, but. Not right this second. Right this second, he runs a hand up Changkyun’s thigh and pushes back into him, leans down to kiss his neck, breath hot on his hot skin.

“I love you here,” he murmurs, low.

Changkyun makes the weakest noise yet, and it tears through Kihyun, the way Changkyun holds him, the way he pleads for him without saying a word. He’d thought this would help him last longer, but now Changkyun is doing that thing Kihyun can’t stand, _staring _at him though Kihyun knows he’s all but blind. To distract himself further, Kihyun keeps kissing down his shoulder, back bowed and Changkyun pulled close so he can tongue over his nipple, a soft kiss, kind. 

“I love you here,” he continues, just as quiet, not wanting to miss the way Changkyun moans in response, his ankles locking tight behind Kihyun’s back to keep him where he is.

A repeat at the edge of his collarbone, and another careful iteration right over the paper-thin rumble of his throat, his fragile windpipe, but Kihyun can’t think about twisting it apart when Changkyun’s fingers are shuddering down his spine. Changkyun believes him so much — wants so badly for this to be real, adores Kihyun so fervently, with everything he has and more. Kihyun kisses over his heart, stays there for a moment longer, panting against him as he feels the beats strengthen, urgent, heady, so stubbornly alive.

“I love you here,” he says.

“That’s where you are,” Changkyun gasps.

Kihyun comes. Changkyun is in his arms, and he’s in Changkyun’s, and he doesn’t mean to, he just can’t help himself when Changkyun is like this. Changkyun moans at the sensation, tightens his legs to keep Kihyun inside for as long as possible, and Kihyun doesn’t pull away, would never, kisses him again and again until they’re sharing breath and Kihyun’s lungs burn. The cars have long since left — they’re here alone. How delicious. Kihyun smiles dazedly into his stupid husband’s mouth, bundles him in closer, and makes plans to never let him get too far away.

Everyone else leaves permanently, at last, on Sunday. Kihyun has gotten into a routine by then: wake up, eat, avoid Minhyuk’s efforts to sabotage him at every turn, attempt to win Jooheon’s favor, privately roll eyes at Wonho and Shownu’s sappy married antics but then realize that Kihyun and Changkyun have become just as bad, coolly ignore Hyungwon as much as possible. Activities, group lunches, group dinners, hot and heavy nights tangled up with Changkyun in the sheets, in the bath, on one memorable occasion on the balcony. The time hardly flies, but Kihyun manages to make it through until the farewells. All his friends are being suitably obnoxious, but he consoles himself with the knowledge that this is the last time he’s going to get this many hugs all at once until the funeral. Wonho’s all cried out, thankfully, and Minhyuk kisses Kihyun on the cheek and rumples his hair, and Kihyun, in a rare moment of mercy, shakes Hyungwon’s hand in parting. Jooheon and Changkyun hug until Kihyun starts to get itchy, and then there’s a painfully awkward moment in which Kihyun doesn’t know if he’s meant to hug Jooheon as well or not, Jooheon visibly hesitating, too, but Kihyun swallows his pride and steps forward, arms outstretched, to give him a friendly embrace. Jooheon has been cordial and kind these past few days, certainly warmer than he’d been at first, but he still hugs Kihyun like a stranger. “Hope to see you soon,” Kihyun adds, clutching at straws, any last chance to keep Jooheon from telling Changkyun everything he must surely suspect. Anything to keep Jooheon away, because who takes a newly-married couple up on an invitation to come visit? Kihyun waited a year and a half to come see Wonho’s place in New Paltz for good fucking reason. Hopefully Jooheon will understand, hopefully he’ll leave Changkyun alone, hopefully he won’t be the serpent in his ear granting him forbidden knowledge, instructing him to get out while he still can. Hopefully. Kihyun’s smile is tight and his grip on Changkyun’s waist as they wave goodbye to the leaving cars is even tighter, and Changkyun kisses him on the cheek and murmurs, “We should all get together here again next summer or something.”

Isn’t that cute, he has hopes and dreams like he’s not going to be six feet under by year’s end. “I’d love that,” Kihyun smiles. 

Changkyun bites his lip just slightly, and Kihyun knows that look, knows it means Changkyun is about to pull some over-the-top, intolerably corny bullshit. “You should go pack,” he breathes, predictable as the sun that rises in the east, as the moon that never sets. “We’re leaving first thing tomorrow.”

“Oh?” Kihyun says, matching his expression, eyebrows quirked with interest. “Where are we going?”

“If you keep asking me, I’ll have to tell you,” Changkyun pouts. “But it’s meant to be a surprise!”

“Husband,” Kihyun starts, lowering his voice, stepping closer, giving him that warm-eyed look that always makes Changkyun melt. “Be honest with me, husband. Tell me. Please? Why do you want to keep a secret from me, hmm?”

Changkyun groans, drops his forehead to Kihyun’s shoulder, acquiesces with pathetic ease. “England,” he mumbles. “We’re going on a literary tour.”

What? No yacht, no Louvre? Well, Kihyun supposes this will have to do. Only by the time he’s done thanking Changkyun effusively and extensively, babbling giddy and excited about how long he’s wanted to see all those places and visit those hallowed halls, does he realize that this actually _is _the sort of trip he’d like to go on, under normal circumstances. Ideally without Changkyun. He’d been self-conscious in college about getting an English degree but not being able to afford the plane ticket to go see Nottinghamshire, Stratford-upon-Avon, even fucking 221B Baker Street, like the other dolts in his program boasted about doing so often. But he has his whole life ahead of him — plenty of time to come back and do it justice. 

And by day five of the trip, Kihyun isn’t regretting the fact that he permitted Changkyun to drag him out for a honeymoon at all — they’ve been exploring each other as much as England, and it turns out Changkyun is so much more gloriously flexible than previously assumed — but he _is _regretting how long he allowed for it to be. If Kihyun wakes up feeling like he spent each previous day in a fog, like he’s skimming a novel to get to the good parts and the rest is a monochromatic blur, that’s because that’s exactly the case, and all he has the strength left to do is skim; the best part is now so close that absolutely nothing else matters. Why would it? Everything is always the same with Changkyun. Same routine. Even this honeymoon, ostensibly perfectly attuned to Kihyun’s tastes, starts to feel dull. Changkyun has booked them a series of private getaway experiences, a box at the Globe to see _Richard III, _looking out over the groundlings like Kihyun has always dreamed of doing, then to Stratford, Anne Hathaway’s cottage all theirs for a day, unfettered access to the gardens — Kihyun picks wildflowers to make a bouquet so lovely that he just sits there and watches it wilt. Private tours. Private rooms. So exclusive, so secluded. It must have cost a fortune. Ostensibly, Changkyun has done this to make everything that much more romantic, just the two of them in their own erudite world, and he couldn’t possibly know about Kihyun’s antipathy towards swarming touristy locations, let alone Kihyun’s somewhat demented worries regarding Changkyun getting whisked away if they get separated in a crowd, but the effect is appreciated, if unintentional. Back to London. D. H. Lawrence wrote _Lady Chatterley’s Lover _whilst in Florence, but Kihyun made his dislike for Italy fairly clear, and so they settle for seeing his home in the city, and then they have high tea at the Connaught, dinner at the top of the Shard, drinks at a tiny hole-in-the-wall bar near Parliament. A first-class train back into the countryside, to Lord Byron’s ancestral home; Changkyun is in paroxysms of delight all day afterwards, and Kihyun recites select lines of _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage _at him until Changkyun can’t take it anymore and has to go take a cold shower because they’ve got a lake tour in thirty minutes, but Kihyun joins him in the shower anyway and they miss the tour completely. Which is for the best; Kihyun can’t risk Changkyun drowning just yet. God, Kihyun is so fucking bored. The only invigorating part is when Changkyun finally, _finally _takes Kihyun on several shopping sprees — Kihyun, always playing the wide-eyed ingenue, asks, “Are you sure?” as Changkyun bestows five Hermès scarves on him, almost too beautiful to be looked at head-on. “But I don’t even have anything to wear them with,” Kihyun laments, intentionally naïve, and Changkyun remedies that situation fairly quickly, too. A set of absurdly expensive fountain pens. Cases of tea to be shipped directly to Bronxville from the Queen’s own supplier. Everything Kihyun could ever want, covered without a second thought. If only Kihyun didn’t have to pretend to be too shy to ask. Not for much longer, though. Not for much fucking longer.

Kihyun is practically foaming at the mouth by the time they’re back in the private jet, back over the Atlantic Ocean. He takes two melatonin, fuck the consequences, he can’t do this. He’s all bundled up in Egyptian cotton sheets, comfortably sinking into the queen-size mattress tucked into the back, while Changkyun sits on an adjacent ottoman and watches films on the flat-screen. If Kihyun weren’t asleep, he’d be pacing the length of the jet, a lion on display for the gazelle it’s hungering to slaughter, but as it is his sleep is fitful, marked by restless dreams, until somewhere over the eastern outskirts of Canada. He lifts his head from the pillow, bleary, to confirm Changkyun is still in one piece, and Changkyun pauses his movie, smiles at him, reaches out to skim a finger along what must doubtless be a pillow crease running the length of Kihyun’s cheek. 

“Another hour,” he murmurs. “You can go back to sleep.”

“Aren’t you lonely?” Kihyun yawns, and Changkyun’s gentle fingers move to slide down the slope of Kihyun’s nose, making Kihyun duck away to hide his face again, tickled. 

“It’s okay. I’m glad you’re getting some good rest. You can hang out with me in the evening,” Changkyun smiles, and Kihyun nods into the pillow although he intends to do no such thing. 

It’s funny, these last three weeks in retrospect. The last year more generally, but that’s a separate matter. Kihyun spent so long obsessing over the wedding, every aspect of it, needing total and complete control. The wedding, the subsequent honeymoon, represented all he’s put in already, how much more he’s going to have to put in. And it was over in the blink of an eye. He’s already forgotten what it was like, getting married. It doesn’t matter anymore. Kihyun falls back asleep, Changkyun’s soft hand curled around his shoulder, and when he wakes up again they’re landing. American soil. Home. Changkyun is blinking at him from under his thick bangs and Kihyun is so _sick _of him, but he can make it two more days, he can make it two more days. Passports, bags, hired car back to Bronxville. He can do it. He’s fine.

Changkyun holds his hand in the car. Kihyun’s skin crawls — it’s all he can do not to pull away. In fact, that takes so much of his energy that he barely talks, he barely smiles, barely interacts. What reason does he have to put up a front for him anymore? Changkyun won’t annul before they combine just because Kihyun is acting surly. Kihyun, all things considered, is being fairly subtle, but Changkyun is _intolerably _incapable of minding his own fucking business for once in his pathetic life, so he squeezes Kihyun’s hand and quietly asks, “Are you carsick?”

Kihyun exhales, glancing over at him through his eyelashes. “A little,” he admits. An easy excuse, one he’s used in the past to get Changkyun to leave him the fuck alone, but it seems that strategy only worked before they were married; now, it just makes Changkyun scoot closer to him, smoothing his other hand over Kihyun’s brow and then asking the driver to turn the AC up. 

The house feels like home. Changkyun, naturally, spoils the effect completely — after Changkyun has unlocked the door, but before Kihyun can even take in a full lungful of the air of his very own mansion, Changkyun has swooped him into his arms to carry him over the threshold. “Changkyun,” Kihyun says, a note of complaint in his voice, but careful, not letting too much show, his arms tight around Changkyun’s shoulders. “Gentle, love, I’m not feeling great.”

“Sorry,” Changkyun says immediately and sets Kihyun back down inside, and Kihyun gives him a pity kiss on the cheek. But Changkyun’s self-reproach is forgotten soon, and he flicks on the light in the foyer and beams around — and there’s that _fucking _painting Kihyun loathes, on proud display directly opposite the entry. But there’s the rug from Changkyun’s lakehouse, and Kihyun walks further forward to see into the living room, and there’s one of the sofas he likes so much from Changkyun’s apartment. It really is like magic, he doesn’t even see any boxes around. But the longer he stays up, the longer he’ll have to wait for his freedom, so he feigns a yawn, looking back at Changkyun apologetically.

“I might just head straight to bed,” he murmurs. “Maybe sleep this off, whatever it is.”

“Can I get anything for you?” Changkyun offers, so soft, so sweet, how does it come so naturally to him? He draws Kihyun in close — like a rabid dog with its jaws locked tight, he never fucking lets go when Kihyun needs him to, always insists on having his kind and loving way — and tilts his head up so he can press his lips to Kihyun’s forehead, checking his temperature. “Tea? Advil? Name it, I’ll make it happen.”

How about some peace, quiet, and all your money? “No,” Kihyun says, too tired of everything but mostly of him to resist, and leans against him, temple to temple. “But I’d love for you to join me in bed, if you’re so inclined.”

It’s a blessing and a curse, how much Changkyun loves him. Blessing only because it’ll make killing him so easy, curse because he actually takes Kihyun up on his offer, walking up the grand staircase with him, opening the door for him, helping him strip out of his clothes, gentling him into bed. Kihyun eyes the chaise on the other side of the room and pulls the duvet up to his chin. Changkyun gets in by his side, but where Kihyun would typically nestle close right away, he keeps to himself, closing his eyes and trying to slow his racing thoughts. He’s not sleepy even a little bit, but if he has to lie here fully awake but perfectly motionless all night long just to avoid spending another instant with Changkyun, he’ll do it, he’ll do anything. 

But somehow he ends up falling asleep anyway. He wakes up what feels like two days later — maybe something of import happens in the interim, but Kihyun loses track. How could anything else be notable in the face of this? He jerks awake at seven on the dot, leaves the sleeping cretin behind, goes to find something to eat in their gorgeous, sexy kitchen. He’d wanted to never cook in here, and he certainly intends to keep that promise, but cereal and coffee is hardly cooking, and he’s twitchy and restless, torn between expressing the raw, unadulterated joy he feels at what’s about to transpire today and being careful, not showing too much of his hand, because this isn’t a big deal to Changkyun, so it isn’t a big deal to Kihyun, either. He curls up with his coffee in the east-facing office to watch the sun spreading through the sky, turns on NPR at a low volume, reminds himself to go to La Mercerie to pick out some new chairs. Normally when he can’t sit still like this, he tracks Changkyun down for a quick lay, but that’s not an option — they’re headed into the city as soon as Changkyun wakes up and makes himself presentable, whether Changkyun likes it or not. 

What’s taking him so long? He’d slept his jet lag off yesterday, Kihyun thought. Honestly, for once he wasn’t paying attention to Changkyun’s sleep patterns, so he has no idea how much Changkyun did or didn’t sleep. Kihyun finishes his coffee and, for lack of anything better to do, goes back to the kitchen to make them some breakfast. Rye popovers and coddled eggs, one of Changkyun’s favorites. The pantry and fridge are fully-stocked, near-identical to the selection they’d had at their apartment, and Kihyun appreciates whoever undertook this enterprise — even the cooking utensils are in similar locations, the level of detail is fantastic. Scatter-brained absentminded Changkyun frequently had to be told not to put the mugs in with the frying pans, so Kihyun knows it can’t have been _his _doing. He hums to himself while he cooks, puts the popovers and eggs in the oven, slices up some fruit, and by the time he hears Changkyun’s shuffling footsteps entering the kitchen, everything is just about done, and Kihyun, wearing the “kiss the cook” apron Changkyun really did get him to celebrate moving in together, turns around to smile his good morning, a half-sliced mango in one hand, a knife in the other.

“Perfect timing,” he says, forcing ebullience at the sight of Changkyun messy-haired, bespectacled, and wearing Kihyun’s pajamas, as though he doesn’t have at least four sets of his own. “Are you hungry?”

Changkyun nods, too sleepy to talk just yet, and comes over to kiss Kihyun hello. “Cute apron,” he rumbles.

“Thank you,” Kihyun murmurs, smiling, kisses him back. “My husband got it for me. Now go sit, I’m thirty seconds away from done. Coffee’s waiting for you, too.”

Changkyun kisses him one more time, then makes his stumbling way over to pour himself a cup. “You’re feeling better?” he asks, sitting in one of the leather bar stools at the island, spinning from side to side like a child. Kihyun’s knife slips through the mango but he pulls his hand away before he can cut his finger, and he smiles again, his eyes quite genuinely giddy.

“Much. And I’m excited to be in Bronxville, and to cook in this kitchen,” he explains happily. “I guess I was homesick after all.”

Changkyun sips his coffee, watching Kihyun warmly from behind his glasses. “We hadn’t even moved in by the time we left, though.”

Kihyun shrugs, flashes him another pretty grin, and slips an oven mitt on so he can pull the contents of the oven. “Call it homesickness for the future, then.”

“The future,” Changkyun repeats, and it always sounds the same when he says it, so syrupy and hopeful. “You have big plans, hm?”

If only he knew. Kihyun hasn’t felt this much like himself in a long time — maybe since he started this whole enterprise, even. “I’ve wanted to be married to you for forever,” he answers, the lines of his face made sweet and lovely by his smile. “Of course I’ve got big plans.”

Changkyun gives him a look. “Did you arrange for a second honeymoon?”

Kihyun laughs, plating their breakfasts and turning off the oven. He’d add kitchen fire to his list of possible murder plans, but risk _this _house and _this kitchen _just to get Changkyun out of the way? Never. “I guess you’ll just have to wait and see,” he hums, then watches Changkyun eat his breakfast. There’s another idea, actually, thanks, Changkyun. Travel with him, someplace remote, impoverished, exotic. A few local poisonous mushrooms in his stir-fry or a venom-heavy fish in his stew, and the investigation will go absolutely nowhere, and that’ll be that. God, Kihyun feels good. His head is clear, the ring is securely on his finger, and he’s back on top. 

UberBlack into town. The Maserati is languishing at the KB Pharma garage once again, an error Kihyun vows to resolve within the week. Calm down, he reminds himself, over and over and over. Not a big deal. Completely mundane. To be expected. A natural part of marriage; a footnote, a casual expectation, nothing to get all worked up over. There’s a branch of Bank of America right here in Bronxville; the journey scarcely takes twenty minutes, even with their house so far-removed from everything. Kihyun’s anxiety is on a crescendo in his head, and the young woman behind the counter is so gracious but it’s not helping, and even still, Kihyun’s hand is steady as he presents photo ID, proof of residence, and signs his name on the line. 

“Your new card will arrive within 5 to 10 business days,” chirps the girl. “Until then, you’re welcome to use the old one, it should now have access to the joint account.”

“Thank you so much,” Kihyun says, with such profound sincerity that it brings alarm to her eyes. “Thank you for all your help.”

“Um,” she says, “my pleasure. Is there anything else I can help you gentlemen with today?”

“No, that’s all,” Kihyun says, although of course it’s only the beginning. He smiles. All teeth. No softness — the discomfited expression in her eyes only grows. But he’s done caring about people other than himself. He did it. He won.

Another UberBlack back home, though Kihyun has no intention of staying. Changkyun reaches for his hand and Kihyun, triumphant, doesn’t let him take it, pulling his arm away as soon as Changkyun gets a light grip. And isn’t Changkyun perceptive, isn’t he smart? He can doubtless tell something is off. Out of the corner of Kihyun’s eye, his face is wary. “Are you carsick again?” he guesses hesitantly.

Kihyun doesn’t even look up from his phone, busy adding another destination to his Uber journey. “Sure,” he says. 

Changkyun makes no attempt to try again. Clever, for once. He stays on his side of the car without reaching out for Kihyun, and Kihyun ignores him completely, scrolling through the menu of Sarabeth’s, widely acknowledged to be the best brunch in Manhattan. Upper East Side location, of course. That’s where Kihyun has always been meant to belong. Finally, the prodigal son returns to claim his crown. Once the car has rolled to a halt at the top of their driveway, Changkyun unbuckles his seatbelt and opens his door, glancing in faint confusion at Kihyun when he doesn’t do the same. 

“Oh, you go ahead,” Kihyun says, not even granting him the dignity of eye contact. “I’m going to the city.”

“What? Right now?” Changkyun says. Audibly startled. “Wh— to do what?”

“None of your business,” Kihyun says, relishes every syllable. “I’ll be back later. Shut the door, would you?”

Does Changkyun say something in response? Does something flash across his face — betrayal, maybe, or just more confusion? If anything of the sort occurs, Kihyun doesn’t care enough to notice. The door closes. The car starts again. And Kihyun leans back against the black leather seats, instructs the driver to open the moonroof so he can see the sky, and luxuriates in the knowledge that from this point forward, everything is going perfectly according to plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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> thank you so much for reading!!! now that we are halfway through, the plot finally begins >:} as always i’d be thrilled to know what you thought so pls leave a comment or come chat at the links above, i’m truly so excited for yall to see what else happens in this story!!!!! (and ps: if you noticed the little easter egg to one of my other longfics, you win my love and admiration!!)
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> **i will be updating this story on the last friday of every month, **so chapter 6 will be posted on **march 27. **if you’d be interested in an email update, SMASH that subscribe button!! stay married-for-money-and-murder out there, see you in march :’’)))


	6. Months 18-23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scenes from the life of a marriage; Kihyun tries; Kihyun fails.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sighs heavily** please read this: warnings** **for this chapter** are: rough sex, undernegotiated kinks (but all sexual activity is highly consensual and enthusiastic!), significant D/s-adjacent elements, not-great BDSM etiquette, choking/breathplay, face slapping, drinking (as in alcohol), and an emetophobia warning.

_MONTH 18_

First order of business: that fucking job.

Of course it’s now Kihyun’s world and Changkyun is just temporarily living in it, but Kihyun had been a little over-hasty, that day after the merging of finances. Brunch at Sarabeth’s had been lovely, and Kihyun hadn’t felt _guilty, _he no longer has any need for that idiotic emotion, but he had spent nearly the whole time planning on a way to spin this, how to explain his sudden rudeness, because Changkyun could still divorce, he could still kick Kihyun out, and Kihyun doesn’t think he will, he knows he won’t, but he wouldn’t bet 200 million dollars on it, so. Back to niceness it is, at least for now. He drinks his tiny fifteen-dollar cappuccino, then makes his way to Manhattan Motorcars to see about getting himself a Porsche. Do you have an appointment, sir? No, but I would like to purchase a car today; I’ll be paying in full. Of course, sir, right this way. Kihyun loves how much money talks, and he touches his checkbook in the inner pocket of his coat and thrills at the feeling. He’s practically half-hard from all the rituals of this, how fawning and servile all the employees of this dealership are, from the sleek, useless lines of these sleek, useless cars, a gilded coffin on wheels, and Kihyun picks a compact little Porsche, an easy starter car that’ll scratch his itch for now. Six fucking figures, Jesus Christ. Part of Kihyun quavers, maybe it’s too much, maybe Changkyun will make him take it back, but then some quick mental math confirms that Changkyun could purchase two _thousand _Porsche Turbos and not even notice the dent in his bank account, so he doesn’t feel bad in the slightest. Kihyun signs the check. Receives the warranty. The car will be delivered to their Bronxville home by the end of the week; it just needs a little tuning. For Kihyun’s next car, he’ll work directly with the dealership to get one custom-made to his liking, but this is fine for now. He just needed something to cement the reality of the situation, something tangible, because already that divine meal at Sarabeth’s is a thing of the past, not even the aftertaste of the stonefruit bellini lingering. Next, he goes to the Hermès store, flashes the card of the man who assisted them at the location in Paris, and leaves with a receipt for a pre-ordered Birkin, which really _will _be made to his specifications and shipped, once again, to his door. 

And once he’s home, he takes Changkyun into his arms and apologizes profusely, sincerely, tells him all manner of sweet lies, that he’s been working on a surprise for him, that he was shy about Changkyun finding out, that he didn’t mean to snap, he’s so sorry, he must not have been feeling well. Changkyun forgives him without a second thought, and Kihyun cooks them dinner in that deeply erotic kitchen, thoroughly chastened. Hopefully Changkyun will just forget about the promised surprise, because God knows Kihyun doesn’t have a damn thing planned for Changkyun that doesn’t involve the business end of a kitchen knife. And that lasts them through the weekend — Kihyun swallowing down his poison, his bitterness about resuming the lifestyle he’d finally thought he could give up, and curling up docile and declawed with Changkyun instead. 

But the week starts again, and it hasn’t been long enough for Kihyun to get his card yet, and the Birkin bag will apparently take four _months _to be made, so he settles for swinging by the Goyard store and picking up a tote there. He’d picked his outfit carefully, _Pretty Woman _meets _Devil Wears Prada, _slim-tailored trousers from a couturier in Paris, his very own Chanel sunglasses, not borrowed, wedding band glinting proudly on his Europe-tanned finger. Hair pulled back from his face to show off his imperious expression. “You look amazing,” Changkyun had said that morning, and Kihyun had resented the tone of surprise but kissed him for the compliment, then gotten on the _fucking _train like an ad man from the ‘60s commuting into Manhattan from the outskirts, meeting his lover in the city while his wife bakes a pie at home. Changkyun won’t even have a hot dinner ready for Kihyun when he comes back, that’s the worst part. But Kihyun only takes the train until Harlem, then calls an UberBlack, because from this point on, he, unlike Changkyun, is never going to slum it. Traffic is shit, but Kihyun had always intended to come in fashionably late today, and the comfort of riding alone in an air-conditioned, calm, clean-smelling luxury vehicle, surrounded on all sides by irritated office grunts rushing to make it to Goldman Sachs, makes him feel pleasantly like royalty, Marie Antoinette in a 2018 Cadillac. 

He has a text from his soon-to-be-former boss, and when he reads it, he distantly remembers that he was supposed to go to a meeting just for him this morning, intended to catch him up on the work he’d missed. The wedding and honeymoon had taken up all two weeks of his paid time off, but Changkyun, dedicated, besotted Changkyun, had networked directly with Kihyun’s superiors to negotiate another week of Kihyun being absent, and Kihyun doesn’t know the exact terms of the arrangement, but it’s about to not matter in the slightest. He leaves his boss on read. Now no one controls Kihyun save Kihyun himself. He’s smiling in self-satisfaction as the car stops outside of his office, takes his sweet time going up to the relevant floor, keeps his walk graceful and even, pushes the doors open with one elegant, lazy hand. The team is gathered in the central hub of the space, waiting for him, and Kihyun pulls his sunglasses off, tucking them into the collar of his Egyptian linen shirt, casting a disaffected eye over the proceedings.

“Nice of you to join us,” says his boss, eyebrows raised. “Congratulations on your marriage, please take a seat.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” Kihyun smiles. Even Stupid Sarah is there— she’s not in any way connected to the analysis department, she must have just come to get a look at Kihyun post-marriage, and he’ll reward her with quite a show, the only nice thing he’ll have ever done for her. 

“Someone already filled you in?” his boss guesses, and Kihyun laughs briefly, shaking his head.

“I quit,” he says, and the people around the table shift in confusion with a low murmur of disbelief. Kihyun stands straighter, his smile widening. “Today. Effective immediately. I quit, I resign, I’m out of here.”

“Um,” his boss says, tiredly pinching the bridge of his nose, “okay, you’re putting in your two weeks, go talk to HR—”

“No, no, no,” Kihyun interrupts, sugary-sweet, one hand cocked casually on his hip. “No two weeks. I quit _today. _Now. Fuck this place.”

The interns are starting to congeal in curiosity behind him, and Kihyun normally hates being the center of attention but this is exactly the kind of spectacle he wanted, and he meets his boss’s gaze fearlessly, mocking, condescending, knowing that for once, he finally holds all the cards, he’s in charge, higher than everyone else in this miserable little office. Kihyun wasted so many years of his life here, and now it’s done, and he’s never felt better.

“If you don’t put in your two weeks, we won’t be able to reimburse you for any— well, you used all your paid time off. Fine. We won’t be able to provide you with any references going forward, and you likely won’t be eligible for unemployment benefits,” his boss cautions, but his voice weakens with every word, likely due to the way Kihyun is staring him down. 

But at that, Kihyun outright laughs, head falling back. “Unemployment benefits?” he repeats, breathless in his hilarity. “Are you fucking kidding me? Do you have any idea how much this bag cost? I’m never going to work another day in my _life, _why the fuck would I need a reference from this pathetic hellhole? Don’t insult me by assuming I’d ever want to be associated with you.” He takes in a calm breath, adjusts his bag on his arm, looks haughtily around the room. He’d had grand plans for a specific monologue, direct words for each coworker who’s made his life miserable in the years he’s worked here, but he decides to keep it simple; he’d like to make it to Tiffany’s to pick out some lamps before noon. “I just want you, all of you, to know, that I hate each and every single one of you for myriad diverse reasons, and if I never see any of you again, it’ll be too soon. Yes, interns, even you.” He smiles at them over his shoulder, and delights in the way they shrink back, frightened. “Understood?”

It’s early in the morning, so the reaction is muted, but still there. Nods, mutters, wary looks, undisguised envy on certain faces. Stupid Sarah’s mouth is gaped wide in shock. Kihyun puts his sunglasses back on and smiles. “If anyone tries to contact me with regard to training my replacement, I’ll sue you for harassment,” he adds lightly, then turns on his slick heel and strides out of the office. 

He texts Changkyun: _Just quit my job… _And of course Changkyun, befuddled, calls him immediately, but Kihyun isn’t in the mood to hear his sweet, concerned voice, so he declines the call and continues on his way. Late breakfast at the Ritz, no reservation but they give him the best table. Changkyun’s name works wonders. Kihyun is so rich now that he doesn’t even know where to _begin _— how has he planned everything, every aspect, except this? He bought a car, he bought a bag, he quit his job — now what? Changkyun is in the way of him taking a permanent vacation, but not for much longer. Well, fuck. Kihyun hates not knowing how to do things, but unfortunately, he really doesn’t know how to be rich. He calls Changkyun back. 

“Meet me for coffee?” he asks, smiling, talking in that soft tone he knows Changkyun loves. “I want to take you out on a date.”

Works every time. “Okay,” Changkyun mumbles shyly, and Kihyun can hear his blush from here, can feel the heat of Changkyun’s cheeks. “I love you. Where are we going?”

“You pick a place,” Kihyun says. “Somewhere nice. Hurry, I miss you.”

“Let me get dressed, I’ll be there in half an hour,” Changkyun promises. “Um, you quit?”

“I’ll tell you all about it when I see you,” Kihyun says, a touch sharper than intended, and hangs up on him. His patience can only last so long, after all, regardless of the charade of sickly saccharine bliss that he’s kept up fairly consistently since his slip-up after the bank. Fuck, he’ll regret that later, though, and he takes deep breaths, remembers how it is to act in love, and awaits Changkyun’s further communication.

In a couple minutes, Changkyun texts him the address, then sends him his location so Kihyun can see that he’s on his way. It’s suitably fancy, a much-hyped and exclusive Japanese coffee bar in the East Village, and Kihyun calls the number on the card Manhattan Motorcars had given him to complain about not having received his Porsche yet. It’s not like he’d be able to find parking in the city, but that’s what valets are for! They promise him delivery by noon tomorrow, and he supposes it’ll have to do. For now, he takes another UberBlack, goes ahead and gets two seats at the bar. This place offers something called a ‘fruit sandwich,’ and Kihyun is already exhausted by the certain fact that Changkyun will point it out to him, inexorably drawn to the whimsical and strange as he is. He orders his coffee, regards his bag adoringly, idly looks up the average cost of a yacht. Another thing he’ll have to get custom-made, he supposes; the expensive ones all have various needless, idiotic trappings, and he has no need for a gold-plated diving board. He starts making a list of things he’d like to have, eventually, but he only makes it past the number of cabins by the time Changkyun, pink-cheeked and over the moon to see him, pushes open the door and joins him at the bar.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Changkyun says, resting his hand on the back of Kihyun’s chair and leaning in for a kiss on the cheek, and Kihyun, smiling, turns away.

“Excuse me,” he says, “I’m married.”

As he’d expected, Changkyun finds this to be the peak of humor, bursting out into childish, buoyant giggles and kissing Kihyun’s cheek successfully this time before tumbling into the barstool by his side. “Oh, love your bag,” he says, blinking at it once he’s settled. “When’d you get that?”

“This morning,” Kihyun says, sips his coffee. “Impulse buy. You want one?” 

“I don’t really have anything to put in it,” Changkyun says. That’s so fucking funny — Kihyun’s first consideration would be that he couldn’t afford a tote that costs $2,245, or that he couldn’t possibly use it, something so precious, so dear, would best be kept in a museum, or archived and untouchable on his shelf, an art piece to be adored, not a commonplace bauble to get slung around through the dusty streets of the East Village and nearly forgotten on the back of a rickety coffee shop chair. But no, Changkyun isn’t worried about any of that. Even now, everything is within the realm of his possibility, even with Kihyun’s fingers tightening around his throat, though gradually, though softly, but tightening nevertheless. No, his concern is that he doesn’t carry enough shit with him to necessitate a Goyard bag. God, Kihyun despises him. “Are you gonna get it personalized?”

Kihyun hums in assent, looking with more love at his bag than he intends to ever look at Changkyun again. “I have it booked for a monogramming appointment next week.”

“Cool,” Changkyun says, genuinely means it, smiles at him, picks up a menu, taps his fingers against the leather cover as he reads down the list. “God— this feels just like old times, hm?”

Kihyun glances at him, amused by his idiocy. “What do you mean?”

Changkyun shrugs, twisting from side to side in his chair. “You know, when we first started dating. We’d get lunch together and then not see each other again for another week.”

Ah, what a wonderful time that was. So peaceful, so quiet, so relatively Changkyun-free. A temporary idyll, designed to be destroyed and all the more perfect for it. “Except now it’s way better, because we get to go home to each other _and_ be together all the time,” Kihyun says, smiling over the gold-plated rim of his delicate coffee cup. “And I don’t even have my dumb job to get in the way anymore.”

“Right!” Changkyun remembers, wide-eyed. “Did something happen? Do I need to talk to your boss again? I thought I made it very clear what the gameplan was for this past week, but—”

“It’s fine,” Kihyun interrupts. “I quit of my own accord. It was just time, you know? That job was never good for me, never what I wanted to do. Now I can focus on what really matters to me.” He dazzles Changkyun with a smile and wishes he could tell him about the looks on all their stupid faces when he’d dropped that bomb, but Changkyun thinks he’s something else, thinks he probably misses his coworkers already, having hated the sin and not the sinners. Keeping the memory to himself will make it all the dearer, Kihyun supposes, and sips his coffee again, enjoying the rich slide down his throat. “And I was thinking…”

Changkyun had been about to order his coffee, but he waves the bartender away, wholly focused on Kihyun when he speaks. “Yeah?”

“It’d be nice, I think, if I were to have some kind of… honorary position at your company,” Kihyun says, stuttering slightly in the middle of the sentence, poised in his artful semblance of bashfulness. “It’d be good for KB, and it’d be good for us. That way, if the board needs to vote on anything, that’s another vote on your side. No salary, of course, that’d hardly be fair, nothing beyond me getting… a modest amount of shares, that’s all. I don’t know, is that stupid?”

He all but bites his lip self-consciously, but Changkyun is serious and contemplative, nodding as he listens. “No, that’s a brilliant idea. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself,” he says.

“Yeah, neither can I,” Kihyun says, but Changkyun doesn’t hear, distracted once again by the insistent bartender returning to take his order. So Kihyun waits patiently, rolls his eyes as Changkyun belatedly notices the fruit sandwich and expresses interest, and is back to smiling blandly once Changkyun is done, his chin cupped cutely in his palm. “So you think we should do that?” he prompts.

“Definitely,” Changkyun nods. “I’ll tell Susanne to put that through this week. We could even put you in charge of one of our subsidiaries, and the most you’d have to do would be signing about one document a month, then get all kinds of… I don’t really know how it works. Tax benefits?”

He’s too rich to know about tax breaks! Fuck, Kihyun is, too. He’ll have to unlearn everything he knows about being middle-class and replace it all with gilded empty space. The thought is enough to bring Kihyun’s smile back, and he lets Changkyun try his coffee, scooting closer to him so neither one of them has to reach. And Changkyun’s hand ends up on Kihyun’s knee, casual, comfortable, and Kihyun looks down at it, swallows, thinks. 

They haven’t had sex since getting back from France. They’ve had the time, they’ve had the opportunity, and despite gorgeous, lavish Bronxville being quite a potent aphrodisiac, Kihyun hasn’t felt the urge, and Changkyun has been content with mere physical closeness, nothing further. Kihyun thinks, _knows, _that’s for the best. The sex was always just a requirement, part of his means to his end. And he got what he sought — they’re married, the card is on its way, and Changkyun won’t be able to annul, as annulments on the basis of fraud or misrepresentation are not only rare, but also practically never given in the case of a personality change after the wedding. Kihyun is untouchable, but — he still hesitates, he still remembers how worried he was before, what pushed him to come crawling back to the house after his outing to Sarabeth’s and ask Changkyun’s forgiveness. Even though Changkyun will clearly give him what he wants forever until Kihyun can simply take it for himself, Kihyun can’t go too much, too soon, get hasty and overexcited and ruin things for himself. So even though his body urges him to pull his knee away from Changkyun’s grasp and sit there frosty and distant, Kihyun forces himself to calm, covers Changkyun’s fingers with his own, and smiles at him. 

“So what did your coworkers say? What happened?” Changkyun urges, evidently not having noticed Kihyun’s internal struggle in the few seconds between his action and Kihyun’s response. “I’m so happy you’re out of there, but— were you planning on quitting?”

Kihyun sighs, tamping down his urge to tell Changkyun he’s not in the mood to talk just so he can see the surprise spread across Changkyun’s face like an ugly stain on fine fabric. “I wasn’t _seriously _planning on it, but when I got there and I saw all of them, and my boss started being a dick, like, as soon as I got in, I couldn’t take it anymore. So I just said that I’m quitting, no two weeks, today. I felt really bad about it in the moment, but now I think I feel better?”

“Like Stockholm Syndrome,” Changkyun agrees, so sympathetic, his hand so warm on Kihyun’s knee, curling around his thigh. 

“Exactly,” Kihyun sighs. “I even cried a little. I mean, I’ve worked there for so long and now it’s over, it’s kind of hard to believe.”

“Oh, angel,” Changkyun murmurs and stands, wrapping Kihyun in his arms instead, kissing his forehead and drawing his fingers through his hair. “It’s sad, I know, but you can still keep in touch with all your friends from the office without having to deal with that toxic work environment.”

“I know,” Kihyun says, and he could endure the hand on his knee but this, cuddles and comfort for a lie about _crying, _is too much, too humiliating, he can’t be seen in public like this anymore. He squirms slightly, clears his throat. “Changkyun— it’s fine, I’m fine. Seriously. I don’t need to process it right now.”

“Oh,” Changkyun says again and lets him go, sits back down, gives him a somewhat strange, searching look. After a moment, he adds, “Sorry,” hesitant like he’s not sure if it’s the right thing to say, and rests his hands on the polished wood bartop.

“It’s okay,” Kihyun says with a soothing smile, breathes through the burning rage steaming up through his lungs, and reaches for Changkyun’s hand, locking his decorated finger through Changkyun’s own. “I promise I’m alright, that’s all. It was emotional, but I know it’s a good thing.”

“I agree,” Changkyun smiles, untroubled, and his coffee comes and he raises it in toast to Kihyun. “Here’s to your freedom.”

Changkyun’s toasts are always so prescient. Kihyun clinks their porcelain cups together and keeps his hold tight on Changkyun’s hand while they sip. No, ignoring him fully, cutting him off in one fell swoop, would be too much; Changkyun has no friends to complain to, but he could tell his employees, he could tell Tamsin, Kihyun’s carefully constructed house of cards could come toppling down with just one of Changkyun’s breaths. Instead, Kihyun will build up his tolerance like to a poison, to an allergen, like a frog in cold water heating up to a boil, until Changkyun is past the point of no return and it’s too late to escape. He won’t even notice his own demise, if Kihyun plays this right. And when Changkyun wakes up one fine morning and the man in bed next to him is a stranger, his eyes that used to be so warm gone cold, utterly uninterested in whatever childish games Changkyun wants to play or cheap diners he wants to supper in, no pet names, no kittenish doting, no tenderness, Kihyun can very comfortably say that he was very much warned.

Small talk through to the end of their coffees. Did you read yesterday’s Modern Love column, yes I did, what about the crossword, wasn’t that a doozy. How was the train this morning, Changkyun wants to know, since that was Kihyun’s first true commute into the city for work — coincidentally his last — and Kihyun puts down his cup, pulls a slight face, and tentatively begins, “It was fine, but it took a while, and it was so crowded, and— oh, gosh, do you think you could have the car brought to our place this week? It just seems so silly to Uber everywhere when we have a Maserati.”

“Okay,” Changkyun nods, surprised but not resisting. “Great idea. I’ll make it happen. You’re just full of great ideas today, huh?”

Kihyun’s smile doesn’t have as many dimples as Changkyun’s, but he does his best. “I try,” he says. 

And that’s likely enough demands for the day. Slow boil, after all. Let him enjoy the water as it heats for now. Kihyun sets his cup down, takes his bag from the bartop, and asks Changkyun if he’s done; when Changkyun answers affirmatively, Kihyun requests the check, makes the token gesture of paying it, and then starts to kiss Changkyun goodbye. “So I’ll see you at home?”

Changkyun falters, visibly confused again. Kihyun can practically see the hamster-powered wheels of his mind turning. “We’re not going back together?”

“I just wanted to get a couple more things for the house,” Kihyun explains, apologetic and sweet, rubbing his hands up Changkyun’s arms. “Boring stuff. Lamps and things. Then it’ll be a fun surprise for you when they get brought in, yeah? I promise you’ll like it all.”

“Maybe you should go into interior decorating,” Changkyun suggests quite sincerely, and Kihyun twinkles his eyes at him like that’s a good idea, kisses him again, lets Changkyun’s compliments about Kihyun’s aesthetic sensibilities wheedle him into staying for another minute, kisses him some more, finally breaks free. A warm and lingering touch to the soft back of Changkyun’s shoulder as he leaves, and his next destinations are Tiffany’s, where he picks out a tolerably colorful lamp to go in the office, and then Saint Laurent, to get some kind of extravagant and silly bomber jacket. But instead, he finds a lovely blazer in wool gabardine, then some Chelsea boots he simply can’t resist, and though he doesn’t end up liking any of the trousers they offer him to complete the look, he makes his way across the street to Burberry, who also make jeans, as it turns out. Fuck it, a scarf to match — it’s September, he’ll need it soon. 

Pacing will be everything, going into this. Changkyun sleeps all intertwined with him, none the wiser that Kihyun is dreaming of the day he can shove him aside without fear of consequences, when Changkyun will have been trained into learned helplessness, no reaction, taking what he’s given and not a drop more. After a slow morning, heart-shaped pancakes and loose-leaf tea, and an even slower afternoon — Changkyun takes a fucking _nap, _as if he’s ever had anything to recuperate from — Kihyun drags them out for a walk, Changkyun ending up bundled in Kihyun’s new scarf even though it stung Kihyun worse than anything to give it away, and they stroll hand in hand, remarking on the changing of the foliage, how remote they are, the nearest neighbors over a mile’s journey to the east, how wonderful it is to have each other, how warm. The sun is starting to set, and Kihyun’s stiff-soled boots have pebbles trapped inside, so they make their increasingly chilly way back home, and once they get there, Changkyun asks if Kihyun is hungry, and Kihyun, tired, says, “I’m really not in the mood to cook. We should consider hiring a chef, sweetheart, don’t you think?”

“A chef?” Changkyun repeats, but Kihyun just kisses him on his cheekbone, then goes upstairs to the master suite to take a bath. While Kihyun soaks in the warm, silky water, surrounded by fluffy foam like an inverse Aphrodite, Changkyun is doubtless moping downstairs, befuddled by Kihyun’s rapidly changing moods, by how to resolve this dilemma. It’s not like _he _can cook. Maybe he’d have earned himself another month, if he’d been able even to make a half-decent fried egg, but alas. It’s impossible to actually hire a private chef on such short notice, and delivery won’t do, either — Kihyun is no longer willing to eat off of plastic plates with plastic utensils. Kihyun entertains himself by thinking about Changkyun’s stupid face as he tries to come up with a solution, a method to get him to jump through those hoops, and by the time he’s leaving the bath — and it’s been verging on an hour by this point — the smell of food is wafting through the house.

So he came up with something, then. Kihyun drapes himself in his bitchiest robe and glides his way downstairs, only to find the table set, half a roast chicken positioned in the middle, various vegetable garnishes and sides, a loaf of what appears to be freshly baked bread. It doesn’t look store-bought or delivered — the chicken is in a floral casserole tin, and Changkyun is standing tableside, looking sheepish.

“What’s this?” Kihyun says with all the wide-eyed wonder of a Disney princess or possibly Wonho, coming over to take a closer look, beaming at Changkyun.

“I couldn’t get a chef in time, but Rose, you know, our CFO, she lives in Greenville, and when I was in college she cooked for me sometimes, and I called to ask if she had anything extra tonight, I know she’s been empty-nesting since she adopted her grandchildren but they’re off at college now too, and,” Changkyun says, then catches himself rambling, goes endearingly red, shuts up, and gestures at the table.

“Baby,” Kihyun says, delighted, “you shouldn’t have. It looks amazing.”

“And I’ll find a real chef for us soon,” Changkyun promises. It’s the kind of promise, tenuous and hopeful, that seems hollow, like he’s expecting Kihyun to say he was just exaggerating, that there’s no need for an actual private chef to cook meals for them each day, but Kihyun says nothing of the sort, just smiles adoringly at Changkyun and takes a seat.

Over the course of their whole idiotic fake relationship, Kihyun has never been mad at him, has never so much as expressed any kind of displeasure, save for that one morning when they were being interviewed for the New York Times and Kihyun hadn’t been able to help it, he’d said _baby, I wish you wouldn’t squeeze from the middle of the tube, _ready to murder him then and there over some ill-used toothpaste, but even that request Changkyun had met with his usual earnest, blustering apologies, and Kihyun had backtracked, told him it wasn’t that big of a deal, even though of course it was. So naturally Changkyun doesn’t know how to handle this, how to comport himself. His affectionate, sweet husband who never so much as asked for a free lunch is suddenly making extensive, expensive requests, seems somehow dissatisfied, and it’s always been easier for Changkyun to feel than it is to think, so naturally he won’t have put any dots together.

He’s still just standing there. Thinking things over. Kihyun isn’t saying much, and maybe it’ll be easier to not say anything at all rather than to continue with his typical inane honey-sweet babble, he’ll try his hand at moderate silence during dinner — and silence is one thing, but this is getting a little silly. “What are you waiting for? You can sit,” Kihyun says, glancing up at him with raised eyebrows, and Changkyun, flustered, remembers where he is and pulls out one of the other chairs, obeying Kihyun’s orders without a second thought.

During dinner, Kihyun only speaks when spoken to, and even that in shorter sentences than usual, not so short as to arouse suspicion, just short enough to keep himself comfortable. The chicken is well-cooked, clearly prepared by someone with a taste for the finer things. How pleasant, to have the chief financial officer of a massive pharmaceutical company at one’s beck and call, providing a wonderful home-cooked meal simply on one of Kihyun’s many whims. Eventually Changkyun’s attempts to make conversation peter out, and he settles for warm eye contact, some of which Kihyun returns, most of which he avoids. _I can do this, _Kihyun thinks. Life is all about balance, that’s been his motto for so long. Measure each demand with a gesture of affection, then proportionally adjust the former up and the latter down, gradually, slowly, until Changkyun is little more than a mindless errandboy, silent, obedient, and Kihyun can end his colorless life as easily as flicking off a lightswitch. They rinse off the dishes together and watch a movie, and Kihyun thinks back to his calendar, his initial month-by-month layout, and the plot of the Changkyun-selected melancholy indie drivel passes him by as he adjusts and alters his strategy, measured and even and very much under the radar. More cars (though he’s not intending on asking for permission), more fancy dinners, and eventually, talking to him less and less and less until Kihyun is ignoring him completely. 

Maybe it’s too easy on Changkyun, this strategy. He’s put Kihyun through absolute hell for the past year and a half. Kihyun is itching for karmic retribution, he wants to be cruel to him, to scoff at Changkyun’s attempted affection, to outwit and mock Changkyun each time he speaks, to have shared meals in one-sided stony silence. The most Kihyun allows himself is telling Changkyun to chew with his mouth closed over breakfast the next morning, but he compensates for that by thanking Changkyun delightedly at the sight of the Maserati in the garage — nothing ever sticks for long.

“I have some more things to pick up in the city today,” Kihyun tells him, his hands locked affectionately behind Changkyun’s neck, “and I’m getting a car delivered — please don’t touch it, just have them put it in the garage, I’ll take you for a test drive later, okay?”

“A car?” Changkyun says as if he might have misheard, and Kihyun nods, smiles, downplays it quite naturally, strokes his fingers along Changkyun’s fuzzy nape to make him putty in his hands. 

“One for me. So we both have a car. It’s cute, you’ll like it.” His smile leaves no room for questioning, so Changkyun drops the subject, kisses Kihyun again, lets him go. 

Kihyun goes into the garage once Changkyun has fucked off into the house somewhere and unlocks the Maserati, and he supposes one advantage of having an average-height husband whose shoulder lines up with yours when you embrace is that there’s no need to adjust the driver’s seat; he fits perfectly. The engine purrs to life, the garage door lifts and floods Kihyun’s field of vision with light, and Kihyun is free of the chains he helped Changkyun lock him in, and drives to the city, valets his car for $45, then buys himself some jewelry. Is this how things are now? Before, Kihyun would have a desire, then have to work his way up to asking Changkyun for it, flatter him and be coy and shy, then thank him afterwards, show him his appreciation, suck on his earlobe and make him laugh even as he starts to get hot for it, but now — he tells him what he wants and he gets it. No build. Barely any follow-up. Kihyun’s world. Changkyun is just passing through. Perfect. 

_Want to meet for lunch? _Changkyun texts, and Kihyun leaves him on read. 

It’s not that Kihyun is bored already. How could he be bored? Just today, he treated himself to lunch at Eleven Madison Park, got pleasantly day-buzzed, called a nearby Tesla store to make an appointment to create his very own dream-mobile, then did the same with Audi and Jaguar. No more buying from dealerships, no more compromises. He wants some work done on the house, too. If it really is his world now — and it is, indisputably — he’ll need it to look the part. And even with all of that, a day ostensibly jam-packed with fun Kihyun-friendly activities, Kihyun still feels himself languishing. Maybe it’s too much freedom all at once after eighteen months of imprisonment in Changkyun’s gilded cage, but he’ll never go back. He’s not bored. He didn’t dream too small; he didn’t aim too high. So what’s with his Goldilocks ennui? Maybe a hook-up would help, but he’s not going to subject himself to the humiliation and horror of using an _app, _and what else is he going to do, cruise at a sauna like he’s 24 again? He might just have to get one of those gold vibrators he’s always been distantly curious about. And Kihyun isn’t much for loyalty, but having an affair is tacky. That could open the door for Changkyun to have his own infidelities and indiscretions, too, which would be unacceptable. Kihyun orders the gold vibrator, sipping a ristretto at the Algonquin hotel, and goes home.

The Porsche is in the garage, and Kihyun has half a mind to dust it for fingerprints to make sure Changkyun did what Kihyun said, didn’t so much as look at the thing. This is the first car Kihyun has owned since his beat-up used Corolla in the summer between senior year of high school and freshman year of college — but that hadn’t lasted long, he’d had to sell it again to be able to afford all his books. He stands, admiring it, for a while. He’d never thought he’d be one of those red-blooded car-loving types, calling their sportscar feminine pronouns and boasting about her like she’s his pride and joy, but even though it’s a mere floor model, not a custom build, and he doesn’t foresee himself as having much use for it, he can’t deny the pride he feels at the ownership, something so precious, something so utterly useless, and it’s all his. 

Changkyun, similarly useless, expensive, and owned, is waiting in the living room, and he pauses his movie — looks like something by Paul Thomas Anderson, if the color scheme is to be believed — to greet Kihyun. “Welcome home,” he says, soft, hopeful for a good evening. “Your car’s here.”

“I saw,” Kihyun hums. “Have you had dinner?”

“I was about to,” Changkyun says. “Care to join me?”

Kihyun feigns despondence. “Oh, I’m _so _sorry, I already ate,” he says, making rueful eyes at him, coming close to take his hands. “I should have warned you so you didn’t wait up, I’m so sorry.”

“No big deal!” Changkyun smiles, he _actually _thinks he’s consoling Kihyun, the arrogance is sickening. “I’ll just have leftovers, then.”

Appalling. Worth more than a private island, and he subsists off of leftovers like a common alleyway raccoon. Kihyun smiles happily, kisses his cheek, and stands. “So you go ahead and eat, then, and I’ll take my car out for a spin and be back by the time you’re done?”

The secret to dealing with Changkyun, it seems, is presenting things not as options but as facts. Had Kihyun asked Changkyun his preference, of course the needy ingrate would insist on coming along, but simply telling him the order of events is an easy way to circumvent any such delusions on his part. As it is, Changkyun looks a little surprised, somehow scolded, and says, “Oh— okay, yeah, that makes sense.”

“Time-efficient,” Kihyun says with an explanatory smile. “Plus I wouldn’t want to keep you waiting to eat.”

“Thank you,” Changkyun says, sounding confused as to what, exactly, he’s thanking him for. “Enjoy your drive, I can’t wait to hear all about it.”

Kihyun leans down to kiss his cheek sunnily, then picks the keys up from where Changkyun had thoughtfully left them in the dish by the door. He’d set his shopping bags down carelessly on the way in — Changkyun can put it all away while he’s out — and in the process of moving them out of his path to the garage, he glances back to Changkyun, who clearly wants to come along, or at least to remind Kihyun of his earlier invitation, but says nothing at all. Good boy. “See you soon,” Kihyun says lightly, and takes his leave.

The Porsche drives differently than the Maserati, which is unsurprising. Kihyun’s next car will be a convertible, he decides; he wants the top down so he can actually see all the people he’s better than as he roars past them. But he loves the purr of the Porsche’s engine, the rush of power to his head from the speed, the grace, the sleekness, the blissful lack of Changkyun by his side, as he’d doubtless be maintaining a running commentary about what he’s thinking, the events of his day, his plans for the weekend, all manner of inane bullshit that Kihyun frankly has never had time for. Fuck, the goal of this exercise was to _stop _thinking about Changkyun, not to reminisce on how much Kihyun hates him and thereby spoil his enjoyment of his drive. Absently, Kihyun thinks, _the third car should be bigger. _With a backseat capacious enough for two. Quite a nice little fleet he’ll have built for himself by the time he deems his collection complete.

He drives until it’s dark, then stops for dinner; he’d lied to Changkyun about having eaten, of course, he just needed some time to himself or he’d explode. It’s a glass-walled restaurant on a pier, the kind of view Changkyun would rant and rave about, and Kihyun sits alone at a table with two place settings, then tells the waiter to take the other set away. Is this how his life will be now? Quiet, free to choose what he likes from the menu without justification — no idiotic lies about _bread rolls, _Jesus fucking Christ — or compromise, if I get the salmon will you get the risotto, just Kihyun and his thoughts and his expensive merlot. He thinks about how he wants his life to be. Just like the cars, just like the house, it has to be perfect, made just to his size. The waiter leaves Kihyun perfectly in peace while he eats, and for that Kihyun leaves a 50% tip, then drives home.

“I feel like I barely saw you today,” says Changkyun over dinner the next evening, and it’s true, Kihyun left early in his Porsche and spent the day fucking around in an artisanal rug store. Once he’d had his fill of being tended to by supplicatory armies of retail workers, he’d gone to a nearby world-class exclusive beauty salon for a facial, then gotten a manicure to top it all off. Before Changkyun, he’d treat himself to such fineries about once a fiscal quarter, but always at the cheapest place he could get a Groupon for — but today, just the lotion at the spa had cost two hundred dollars a bottle. He’s been admiring himself in every reflective surface he can find, and of course Changkyun had remarked on the softness of his skin, but Kihyun is finding satisfaction somewhere else. 

“I just have so many errands to run, as it turns out,” Kihyun says, an apology without apologizing, and Changkyun accepts it, holds Kihyun’s buffed and polished hand and thanks him for working so hard to make their house nice, suggests they wind down together this weekend, would you like to go up to the Finger Lakes at some point soon? Sure, sweetheart, why not. Kihyun sips his glass of red, dark and rich, brought with them from France, and glances at the clock — that’s seven hours apart today, three together, so far. By the end of the night, it’s been seven and six, if Kihyun doesn’t count the hour and a half he spent alone downstairs before Changkyun awoke and joined him. Although he supposes he should — every second of solitude is priceless. Kihyun likes that morning hour, likes to see his kingdom dimly lit and silent, his ever-faithful consort rosy-cheeked and longing in their bed. Eight and a half and six, then. And nine and a half hours asleep. This was supposed to be Kihyun’s great escape, his final push into freedom, and yet he’s more regimented than ever. He’s never resented Changkyun more, as hard as that may be even for him to believe, but he comforts himself with the thought that it’ll all end soon. The clock is ticking, and Kihyun counts the seconds and waits.

The next day, he only manages eight and five, respectively. It takes an earlier exit and a later return. And Kihyun can’t believe he didn’t see it sooner, that ignoring him is the fastest way to rid himself of him, to force Changkyun into wasting away; he’s grown to thrive off of Kihyun’s attention, nourished like Tinkerbell by his kind words and gestures, and if his supplier cuts him off at the source, he’ll doubtless wither, shrivel into something meeker than he is even now. How long can Kihyun keep it up before Changkyun gets the picture? It’ll be an interesting experiment. But Kihyun reminds himself that this isn’t about Changkyun. Whatever emotional damage his easy, biddable husband sustains as a result of Kihyun’s coldness is a bonus, the cherry on top of an otherwise already impeccable dessert. 

It makes Changkyun happier to see him, anyway, he treasures him more in the mornings, sends him off with kisses and well-wishes, asks only once to come along, and the next day, Kihyun takes him. He takes him, but abandons him at Saks, goes instead to an absurd and impractical juice cleanse place nearby and signs them both up for a plan he doesn’t intend to participate in. It’s another eight and five kind of day, even with the shared time in the city. Kihyun is distracted once he comes to pick Changkyun back up, he takes a phone call from a private art dealer to see about starting a collection, and Changkyun is happy enough to trail along by his side, even with Kihyun only responding to an average of one out of every three things he says. But Kihyun is still being charitable. He allows Changkyun to touch him on his back and hold his hand, kiss him whenever he likes, pick a show for them to watch — some B-list supernatural thing with laughably bad special effects and cringe-inducing performances. Changkyun seems to like it just fine, but Kihyun can’t take more than one episode and makes his exit early. 

Should Kihyun take up a sport? Apparently, rich people these days are all hooked on something called ‘pickleball,’ but Kihyun would rather turn his plan into a murder-suicide than degrade himself by participating in anything with such an idiotic name. Horseback riding is another favorite of the upper crust, and although Kihyun thinks he’d look very fetching in those tight pants and tall boots, he’s not really one for animals, and he’s never tried before, so the possibility of being terrible at it is enough to keep him from even considering that idea for more than five minutes. He supposes just _owning _a racehorse wouldn’t be remiss, though, and investigates that prospect. Today his goal is nine and four. Or, at the very least, eight and five again, but some silence while at home. Changkyun gives him his space, only peeks into Kihyun’s claimed office every thirty minutes or so to see his color swatches, offers him food and drink and hopeful, plaintive-eyed smiles. Has he noticed? Will he? So far he hasn’t commented on hardly anything that’s changed in Kihyun’s lifestyle. Not even the informational brochure Kihyun left on the coffee table, the specs on the Jaguar he designed for himself, tempted him into asking. Shame. Kihyun would have loved to gush about it, actually, because it’s so ridiculous, so needless, gold exterior, convertible, every inch customized. So ostentatious he’ll only drive it on special occasions, crucial to his emotional well-being nonetheless. He only manages eight and five yet again, but doesn’t count it as a failure; Changkyun gets less intrusive by the day, starts to fade into the background, and soon he’ll be nothing more than a piece of furniture, yet another adornment in Kihyun’s tailor-made existence. 

Kihyun’s life is better like this. Eight and five is a good balance. If Kihyun never initiates conversation, Changkyun gradually gives up as well, but Kihyun gives him enough affection and attention that he continues to be content; if Changkyun gets between seven and fifteen kisses a day, it seems to satisfy whatever part of his brain is clinging to their marriage, and he won’t try to escape. He trained up quite nicely, Kihyun thinks. All it took was two weeks of this gradual gradient, a diminuendo into indifferent, lukewarm co-existence. And it seems like this is how things are going to be until Kihyun brings the knife down, and Kihyun is alright with that. More than alright — he’s _happy_. He says that to himself, over and over and over, when he and Changkyun are apart: I’m happy. This is what happiness looks like, to me. I have money; I have a future; I have what I want; I am happy.

And yet something is missing, still. Of fucking course it is. Kihyun, Caesar of an empire without subjects, has finally acknowledged his boredom. It had been manageable at first, but he can’t deny it any longer, and he’ll _never _work in an office again but the one advantage of a steady job was something to occupy his days with — then Changkyun came along and became Kihyun’s top priority instead, but now, sans job and sans courtship, Kihyun is directionless. The upgrades of the house will begin in the next couple of weeks, but it’s not like Kihyun himself is going to be repainting the downstairs study or replacing the dining furniture, bossing interior designers around at most, so — he’s bored, he’s caging himself in, but this time it’s a cage of his own making, and who holds the keys, who else is locked in with him? It’s strange Kihyun hasn’t thought of this before. Changkyun has always been practically a living sex toy to him, he may as well be put to use once again. After all, why should Kihyun drive himself anywhere when he lives with his chauffeur?

“I want you to take me out to dinner,” Kihyun announces, and he bats his eyelashes to soften the demand, but the softening hardly makes it less of what it is. It’s been a while since his latest demand, so naturally Changkyun is surprised, looking up from his granola.

“I’d love to,” Changkyun says. There’s something in his voice, a note of profound surprise, like maybe Kihyun had pulled back the curtain too soon, like he’d drawn attention to the very thing Changkyun was never supposed to notice. He continues anyway, blossoming under Kihyun’s direct look. “Tonight? Where? I’ll make reservations. What kind of food?”

“You pick, I don’t care,” Kihyun says, checks his manicure, doesn’t even give him the dignity of sustained eye contact. “Somewhere in the city, I guess. Yes, tonight.”

“Got it,” Changkyun says. He’s so puppy-love-devoted, he’s so pleased at the idea of taking his pretty husband on a date, it’s sick how grateful he is for something so simple. “I’ll find a place right now.”

Kihyun very nearly pities him. He’s such a pathetic creature, it’s a natural reaction. As Kihyun comes over, Changkyun stills, but in a happy way, hoping to make it easier for Kihyun as he leans down for a kiss. His lips are soft, and Kihyun smiles into his mouth for just a moment. “Dress up,” he adds after thinking about what else Changkyun might take for granted. “But don’t wear that blue shirt. It makes your shoulders look weird.”

“Oh,” Changkyun says, small, deflating so quickly from his prior joy. He makes it so easy. “I thought you said it was fine.”

“I changed my mind,” Kihyun says and kisses him one more time, then pulls back. “Reservations for no later than eight, please. I don’t want to be driving back at midnight.”

Changkyun’s wires are evidently too crossed for him to be able to reply out loud, so he just nods, and Kihyun fights the urge to pat him on the head like a particularly simple-minded farm animal. He goes about his business, and receives a text from Changkyun fifteen minutes later with an address and a time. Only two Michelin stars? Ugh. Kihyun takes up residence in one of the ground-floor spare rooms, the one he plans to have converted into a veritable photography darkroom within a month or so, and spends the day there, looking up more contractors and landscaping services, until it’s time for him to get ready for dinner. Maybe he should exile Changkyun to his own private quarters, give Kihyun some space to maintain, but he rethinks that rapidly — too much freedom isn’t good for Changkyun’s sensitive constitution, and the tighter Kihyun keeps the leash, the better. 

There’s something sincere in the way Kihyun prepares for this date; an obsessively clean shave, faint touches of cologne at his temples and wrists, hair brushed sleek, shirt matched to the trousers to the socks to the shoes. But it’s not for Changkyun, whom Kihyun has already duly worked to impress and bewitch. Kihyun is putting on this gilded armor for himself and for the other patrons of Daniel, the restaurant Changkyun has selected. In a way, this is his debut into society. On his husband’s arm, in the public eye, intentional. It matters. And Changkyun is mysteriously absent from the master suite the whole time Kihyun is dressing, but he’s waiting downstairs already primped and made proper, nervous like a teenager waiting for his homecoming date, smiling an anxious, earnest smile when he sees Kihyun. 

“We can take your car,” Kihyun says in lieu of actual greeting or acknowledgment, brushes past him to head to the garage, permits Changkyun to open the door for him. Changkyun follows with the keys, opens the car door for Kihyun as well, and Kihyun slides in without thanks, buckles himself in, scrolls idly through his phone as Changkyun pulls them out of the garage and onto the road. 

“You look lovely,” Changkyun says, risking a glance over to him. Kihyun exhales through his nose but does nothing else to validate his weak attempts at flattery. “Is the restaurant alright?”

“Well, you know I don’t like seafood that much,” Kihyun says. “But it’s fine.”

“Oh,” Changkyun says, and he sounds so crestfallen. “We can go somewhere else—”

“You already made the reservation, yes?” Kihyun cuts off, trying to keep his tone light, his frown at bay. “There’s no point. It’s fine. We can share the tasting menu and you can have whatever I don’t want.”

“Good idea,” Changkyun agrees, but that’s meaningless, he’d agree with anything Kihyun says at all. “It’s not all seafood, though. There should be some steak. Probably some duck.”

Kihyun blinks, nonplussed. “Yes. Thank you. I _also _know how to read a menu.” And he shouldn’t be mean, he shouldn’t do this, not with Changkyun teetering on the edge of breaking apart in his palms, but— Changkyun makes it so _hard _to ignore him, because Kihyun is better than him, he’s always been better than him, but Changkyun sees them as equals and Kihyun needs him to know he’s wrong.

“Of course you can read a menu, but it seems like you didn’t read the whole thing,” Changkyun says. In any other voice that would sound passive-aggressive, but he makes it sweet, well-intentioned, genuinely concerned that Kihyun thinks he’s going to dinner at a restaurant that serves only food he dislikes. “Hopefully there’ll be something you like.”

“And what are you going to do if there isn’t?” Kihyun says. By now he’s sufficiently irritated as to necessitate looking up from his phone, where he’s got some scathing reviews of the restaurant pulled up, but he manages to wrangle himself into sounding like he’s teasing, poking fun, never serious, never cruel. “Go into the kitchen and cook something yourself? Call the chef’s parents to tell on him? It’s _fine._”

Changkyun gets the message and quiets down. And Kihyun would have been content to leave it at that if Changkyun hadn’t then made a very odd driving decision, and Kihyun’s frown can no longer be repressed, his phone coming back out to pull up Google Maps. 

“Which route are you taking? 9A?” he says. “87 is always faster.”

“9A has a better view,” Changkyun says, quietly defensive, but it’s nothing compared to Kihyun’s disbelieving scoff.

“Of _New Jersey, _yes. It’s dark, anyway, what can we see? The Greyhound bus station? Incredible. What a wonderful scenic journey,” Kihyun mutters. It was meant to be under his breath, it was meant to be quiet, but Changkyun hears him, and Kihyun wishes he could take it back, but the beat in which he still has time to apologize comes, then goes.

There is a brief silence. Changkyun’s fingers drum, momentarily, on the steering wheel. “There’s always horrible traffic on 87 getting into Manhattan from FDR,” he says, and that’s _definitely _defensive, that’s pushback, that’s some semblance of a spine. Kihyun’s eyebrows shoot up. “Besides. I like taking 9A.”

“For what reason?” Kihyun says, exasperated, somehow thrilled. He’ll push. He’ll push until Changkyun breaks, and then Kihyun will take it all back again. What is he doing? Why the fuck is he doing it? God, he can’t stop himself. “It’s not the fastest. The ‘view’ is laughable. You must just like it because no one else does and you love being unique.”

“Maybe,” Changkyun shrugs. His hands are tighter on the wheel, and in the second Kihyun lets his eyes linger on his face, he sees that Changkyun’s cheeks are flushed, his jaw in a determined set. “It’s just an easy drive. Very straight, not a lot to keep track of.”

“So it enables irresponsible driving,” Kihyun concludes. “You can zone out and let herd immunity keep you in your lane. Take the Parkway, then, I don’t understand what’s so special about 9A—”

“There’s nothing special about 9A, and I learned my lesson with irresponsible driving years ago, you know that’s never happened again,” Changkyun disagrees. “Not everything I do has a perfectly detailed reason. I prefer to take 9A. I’m used to it. So that’s why we’re taking it. That’s all.”

“Habits,” Kihyun says, and he loves this, he _loves _it, they haven’t had a single actual fight the whole time they’ve been together but he knows one when he sees one, and he doesn’t know why Changkyun feels brave enough to talk back to him when Kihyun could kill him with one well-timed twist of the hand around his heart, but it’s making him feel so— so— “are a crutch. You should never leave a habit unquestioned. Ever heard of path dependence?”

“That’s not relevant,” Changkyun says. He sounds shocked at himself for saying that, his voice losing confidence towards the end of the phrase, and he looks quickly to Kihyun as if to confirm he didn’t cross a line. Kihyun, impassive, presses his lips together in displeasure but permits him to continue, intrigued by what he’ll have to say for himself. “It’s not a habit. It’s a preference. Sometimes I’ll take other roads to get into the city, but you know I’d rather take the train, anyway.”

“I do know that, though I’ll _never _understand it,” Kihyun huffs. “With the kinds of resources you have— why would you force yourself to go through that?”

“Go through— taking the train is not some kind of hardship,” Changkyun frowns. Oh, Kihyun has never heard him sound like this, his voice low and displeased but not angry, not quite. He’s confused, maybe frustrated, and defending himself, standing up for his very mediocre, nonsensical opinions, but still not angry, not yet. “That’s another preference. There’s never parking in the city, anyway, so—”

“So take a taxi,” Kihyun suggests bitterly, arms crossed. “What, you can’t afford it?”

“Sometimes I don’t want to make small talk with a driver,” Changkyun says, which is _very _new, Kihyun’s eyes flash with interest. Changkyun is never anything less than warm with the various servicepeople in his life, so to hear that he’s sometimes not in the mood for such niceties? Fascinating. “Okay? Sometimes I’d rather just be alone with my thoughts.”

“So you take the subway instead,” Kihyun points out, lips curled in a mocking smile. “How many people are on any given train with you? A hundred, a thousand? That’s your idea of alone? Much more private, yes, much more conducive to being alone with oneself.”

Changkyun shakes his head, and Kihyun can practically hear his heart beating from here — or maybe he’s confusing it with his own, his pulse fast and loud and alight. The stakes are nonexistent, and Kihyun has never particularly cared about fighting with a partner, but there’s something about this, something about being outwardly mean to Changkyun to his face and having Changkyun actually resist in small but meaningful ways that really gets Kihyun’s murderous impulses going. He could end it all right now, he thinks. Just reach over and jerk the steering wheel to the side. Maybe they’d both die, or maybe he could crawl out through the passenger door, the car overturned, and leave Changkyun trapped inside as the car burns down. No one would ever know. But there’s foie gras waiting for him at the restaurant, and Kihyun has developed a taste for it, so he keeps his hands to himself. Passive-aggressively pulls up the route on Google Maps and hums when he sees that they’re going to hit traffic coming in, but Changkyun doesn’t take the bait, staring ahead with his hands and jaw tight. He must be disgusted with himself, but Kihyun has never found him more interesting. 

So he has a temper after all. Kihyun was really beginning to think his head was perfectly hollow, but it turns out he’s capable of irritation, of self-defense. Good news for Kihyun’s boredom, but bad news for Kihyun’s murder plan. And Kihyun can’t believe that Changkyun _actually _got him riled, actually got him mad — because he is mad, he can’t believe he’s wasted all this time trying to gentle Changkyun into his own subjugation when Changkyun was nursing resentment all along, and if Changkyun is no longer going to be sweet to him, then Kihyun has nothing left to lose. They’re silent the rest of the drive, but when they’re handing the keys over to the valet, Changkyun puts his hand on the small of Kihyun’s back and murmurs, “I’m sorry, you were right, we should have taken 87,” leans in to kiss him on the cheek, and Kihyun only turns his head away to avoid his kiss after he’s already maintained contact for a couple of seconds.

It seems that was enough for Changkyun, because he’s all bland cordiality and warmth again as they’re led to the table, as they take their seats, coats neatly hung up by the maitre d’. Heads turn to watch them pass, and Kihyun has never felt better, stronger, richer, more in control. He smiles not unkindly at Changkyun in a momentary lapse of judgment, but Changkyun misinterprets that for a genuine desire to reconnect, forgive and forget, passing Kihyun a menu and reaching for his hand over the table in one fell swoop — Kihyun won’t allow that, draws his hand back, looks at the menu instead of at him. It is an awful amount of seafood, more than half the list. But otherwise, the restaurant is fairly to his liking, quiet and private and expensive. Kihyun pretends to read through the extensive wine selection, but he’s thinking about their fight in the car, that look on Changkyun’s face, frustrated and falling behind but trying to keep up. The old dog might learn a new trick yet. Lost somewhere in the Chardonnays, Kihyun only looks back up to see Changkyun murmuring to the waiter, my husband would prefer a seafood-light menu, will you please inform the chef, thank you. 

Kihyun hadn’t even told him if he wanted the prix fixe or the tasting menu; that’s a big assumption on Changkyun’s part. He closes the wine list and regards Changkyun with unadulterated derision, still so fucking mad at him for daring to undermine Kihyun’s authority with regard to driving routes that he can hardly see straight. “So you’re ordering for me now? I can’t make my own choices, just like with 87?”

“No,” Changkyun says, startled right back out of his happy complacency, “no, of course you can— I just thought, since you said you didn’t care for seafood, that you might want—” 

“You could have asked,” Kihyun sniffs.

Changkyun struggles, visibly, to keep from questioning whether Kihyun would have answered. “I’m sorry,” he says instead. Second time tonight, and all before the appetizers; not bad. Kihyun will push him for three by the time they’re bringing the entrees out. Kihyun purses his lips but doesn’t accept his apology, and Changkyun swallows, nods slightly, focuses on unfolding his napkin and draping it across his lap instead, straightening out the cutlery although it’s already straight. Kihyun watches him, gaze cool and calculating, watches the bastard squirm, what must Changkyun think is happening here? Was relenting with regard to the road they’d taken sufficient apology, or is he going to have to continue? Maybe he’s noticed Kihyun’s behavior the past few days, and maybe he’d like to know if it’s all in his head or if Kihyun really doesn’t love him anymore. He’s visibly building himself up to saying something — he keeps taking in breaths, decisive, then deflating again after losing heart, lips moving soundlessly with his self-rebuke, and the cycle restarts in another few seconds. Like a wind-up doll, or Sisyphus with his boulder. Fascinating, truly. Whatever backbone he’d found in the car has vanished completely, and he’s back to his easily-trampled wallflower self, shy, acquiescent under Kihyun’s unpredictable, stormy dominion, and Kihyun looks him directly in the eye, a challenge, a call to arms, and he manages not to shrink back, takes in a bigger breath, and this time it sticks:

“Kihyun,” he begins. “You know how much I love you, how much I want to make you happy, and I couldn’t _not _say something, because I feel like the past few days, you’ve been— a little bit— all I’m trying to say is, if there’s anything you need, I want to help, and—”

“Darling,” Kihyun interrupts, lazy. “I want a nice, quiet dinner. The world is so loud these days, and we’ve done enough talking. Do you think you can do that for me?”

As if Kihyun had stolen the breath right out of his lungs, Changkyun stutters into silence, but he’s sitting straighter, his eyes taking on yet another unfamiliar shade. Like the confidence on their wedding night, like the defensiveness in the car, but different still, a new kind of heat, and his tongue slips for a moment over his lower lip, and he says, “Yes,” nothing more, nothing less. No questions. No disrespect. He accepts what Kihyun gives him unexamined, as it is, and Kihyun—

Kihyun can’t look away. He leans forward, and Changkyun, bewitched, magnet-pulled, leans in with him, to hear Kihyun continue in a murmur, “Can you show me just how quiet you can be?”

Changkyun’s eyes are wide and dark, and he opens his mouth but not to speak, just to breathe, and nods, once, tensely. He’s nearly smiling, Kihyun can see it at the corners of his lips. He thinks it’s a game, one he’ll be able to win. He couldn’t be more wrong. It had been an impulse, wicked and mercurial and ill-advised, an alternative to causing a scene in front of all these fucking witnesses, a new creative way to punish Changkyun for wasting his time, for making him wait, for disagreeing with his infallible opinions about New York highways. But Kihyun finds himself smiling back, and they look at each other hardly blinking, hardly moving, even as the waiter brings their first courses. Kihyun raises his eyebrows at Changkyun and starts in on his poularde, but Changkyun is still watching him, and finally, Kihyun takes a measured sip of his wine and says, “Eat,” and Changkyun blushes and rapidly obeys, like he’d forgotten where he was and what they were doing, too much in Kihyun’s thrall.

Changkyun is true to his word. He hardly makes a sound through all of dinner. Kihyun is the one to talk to the waiter, which normally he’d take as a burden and complain about, but this permits him to be bossy and keeps Changkyun silent, so he finds himself not minding. He’d expected Changkyun to sulk over this forced taciturnity, but his eyes are still alight in a way Kihyun recognizes less and less the longer he looks at it, and the meal passes quickly, Kihyun hardly notices what he’s eating until they reach dessert and he hates his pavlova so much that he passes it to Changkyun after just one bite. Changkyun eats it all and daubs a trace of meringue on the edge of his mouth away with his napkin before Kihyun can even scold him for being messy. Kihyun doesn’t know whether to feel forgiving, triumphant, perplexed, superior. Certainly no longer angry, though; Changkyun has very thoroughly distracted him. He’s never seen Changkyun like this — he’s always been weak-willed and timid, but to _this _extent? With that look in his eye, no less. For the first time in a while, Kihyun can’t predict Changkyun’s reaction, and to his immense surprise, that doesn’t alarm him. Changkyun helps Kihyun back into his coat, and Kihyun doesn’t push his hand away at the light touch of his fingers to the sides of Kihyun’s neck. 

In the car, Changkyun is still silent, but the air between them is charged, and when Kihyun looks at him, he can see that he’s fighting a smile. Kihyun wants to wipe that smile off his face, but he has nothing to say for now. Changkyun takes 87 back to Bronxville, and he looks meaningfully over to Kihyun as he makes the relevant turn, and though Kihyun doesn’t dignify it with a response, privately he’s pleased. Fast learner. What else can he learn in so little time? Can Kihyun silence him with one word, with one look? Get him on his knees with a particularly intentional breath? Kihyun leans his head back on the seat and belatedly identifies that warmth running through his body as something adjacent to arousal. It’s so heady, having Changkyun bend over backwards to accommodate him. Like revenge, like comeuppance, after Kihyun has spent the past eighteen months molding himself into a shape that’ll be to Changkyun’s liking — now, Changkyun is the one who must yield. 

Changkyun pulls them into the garage, clearly wants to say something about Kihyun’s car but restrains himself, comes over to open the passenger door for Kihyun. “Can I interest you in a nightcap?” he murmurs, evidently thinking that talking all low will function as a loophole, since it’s still quiet. 

“Sure,” Kihyun shrugs. In the car, he’d settled on forgiving overall — both for the fight before dinner, and because not every rich idiot would submit quite that quickly to their obviously gold-digging spouse ordering them around. So he’ll allow Changkyun a companionable drink, maybe a more extensive kiss goodnight than usual, by way of thanks for his manipulability. Changkyun looks delighted at Kihyun’s acceptance, and they go into the house together, Kihyun’s arm slipped through Changkyun’s. 

In the kitchen, Changkyun makes his way over to the liquor cabinet, starting to look for a nice brandy. But Kihyun lights immediately upon a problem and gasps in horror, rushing to turn the stove off. “What the _fuck?”_

“What?” Changkyun says, surprised. “You okay?”

“You left the stove on,” Kihyun says, and his hands are starting to shake, he needs to do something else with them before he occupies them with something he might regret. “Are you kidding me? What were you even using the stove for?”

“I— I made scrambled eggs,” Changkyun says. He sets the bottle and the glasses down, blinking over at Kihyun. “I’m sorry. I thought I turned it off.”

“Well, you didn’t. You could have burned the fucking house down,” Kihyun says. He leans back against the counter, closes his eyes for a moment, rubs his forehead with his hand to try and calm himself. The good will Changkyun had built up for himself by his perfect silence during dinner has vanished in an instant, and Kihyun’s vindictive rage, eighteen months’ worth, starts to rear its indefatigable head. “I shouldn’t have to follow after you and check every single time. That’s ridiculous. You’re a grown man.”

“I’m sorry,” Changkyun says again, four for four, but now he really does look so worried, he doesn’t see this as a game anymore. “I’ll check next time, I promise, remember how I learned at the apartment? I’ll learn again. I’m sorry.”

Kihyun pulls his hand away from his face and glares at him. “You didn’t learn _shit. _I never told you, but I had to turn it off for you at _least _once a week.”

“Oh,” Changkyun says. Always so dumb and wounded and confused. “I… I didn’t know.”

“Clearly,” Kihyun mutters. Changkyun is starting to edge his way over to him, the brandy forgotten, and Kihyun feels wild, he feels untamed, like he could tear Changkyun’s pomegranate heart out if he gets too close, crush it red and sweet between his fingers, drink him to the last. This is his point of no return, Changkyun won’t be able to bring him back from this, he’d provoked him in the car, he’d wanted to make him angry, and now he’s done it, now Kihyun won’t ever let him forget this. “Where would you be without me picking up your mess? You need someone to look after you all the time, is that it? You can’t fend for yourself. You’re like— like a fucking hothouse plum, you’d die if unattended.”

Changkyun had been taking on a very reprimanded expression, more and more upset the closer and closer he gets, but at that, his head cocks to the side and he looks distracted. “I don’t think plums grow in hothouses, actually.”

Kihyun’s responding noise is practically a snarl. “What do _you _know about _agriculture,_” he spits, grabs Changkyun by the collar of his shirt, hauls him in, kisses him so hard he feels Changkyun’s teeth behind his lips, and Changkyun staggers, nearly falls against him, has to brace his hands on the countertop to stay upright, and he kisses Kihyun back with the same intensity, groaning low when Kihyun bites savagely at his mouth and pulls his shirt collar too tightly. They’re hardly even kissing — it’s all tongue, all teeth, Kihyun yanking at Changkyun’s shirt until the top button pops open and Changkyun doesn’t care, Changkyun never cares about his things, Changkyun is pushing his hips against Kihyun’s and dragging his hands up Kihyun’s sides to pull his shirt out from his slacks, then putting his hands on his bare skin. Kihyun makes a choked-off noise into his mouth and struggles, trapped between him and the counter, and it’s easy to push Changkyun away, then chase after him, pushing and pushing until they’re caged against the kitchen island. It’s low enough that Kihyun can plant his hand in the middle of Changkyun’s chest and press him back, leave him half-reclined against the island while Kihyun leans over him, Changkyun on bent elbows and Kihyun pushing a thigh between his and letting Changkyun moan at the back of his throat and push his hips up helplessly. 

They’re both hard, and the friction of rubbing together just like this is nearly enough. Changkyun must be uncomfortable, his trousers are tight, his zip pressed right against his cock, and his noises are hoarse and whimpery, caught in the fraction of space between their mouths. Kihyun bites down to his neck and leaves a mark, the exact kind of hickey he always hated for Changkyun to leave on him, but Changkyun loves it, Kihyun feels the throb of his heavy dick even through the layers separating them, and Kihyun kisses him and kisses him until his elbows give out and Kihyun pushes him down flat against the marble of the island, moving up to crawl over him and surround him completely. 

It’s messy and rough. They kiss with too much spit, and Changkyun is wincing from the sensitivity as Kihyun ruts their hips together, fast, dirty, and when he tries to move a hand down to undo his belt, Kihyun grasps it to wrench it away, and he moans. “Please,” he manages, strained, and Kihyun pushes his wrist hard into the marble countertop, much like he’d done at their wedding venue but with so much more purpose and intent, he feels the tendons of Changkyun’s wrist flexing as his fingers curl, tastes the faint whine he tries to hold back, delights in the way he finally gives up and goes limp underneath him. 

Save for his other hand, which seeks to touch Kihyun, touch him more, pull him closer. Kihyun’s shirt is still rucked up above his waist and Changkyun’s searching fingers run hot over his ribcage. He’s trying to say something else, Kihyun can feel the futile push of his tongue to form words, and Kihyun arches his back to drag their clothed cocks together more urgently, using Changkyun to get off, Changkyun’s pleasure is secondary. But he’s undeniably getting it, flushed hot all over and moaning when Kihyun breaks their filthy kiss to lick over the mark he’d already left. “If you felt,” Changkyun pants, “this strongly about agriculture, you should have said something sooner.”

“You brat,” Kihyun snaps and sinks his teeth into Changkyun’s throat — Changkyun’s breath goes high and sharp and frightened, but he’s harder than ever in his slacks, fingers pushing desperately between Kihyun’s vertebrae. “I’m going to sell you to the highest bidder.”

Changkyun trembles underneath him, and Kihyun claims his mouth again, thinking that he’d never let anyone take Changkyun away from him, never, not when he’s so much _fun _to play with. He’s keening into their kiss, his sensuous mouth slack and wet and bitten-bruised, and Kihyun pulls back for just a breath to see what he’ll do, and Changkyun whines incoherently and surges up off the island countertop to chase him, kiss him again, pull him back down atop himself to where he’d been. It would be kinder, maybe faster, for Kihyun to give him his hand to fuck into, or let him stroke himself off, but Kihyun wants to see him come just like this no matter how long it takes, his sounds and motions getting more and more mindless with each jerk of his hips, each time Kihyun’s tongue presses into his mouth. He’s trying to spread his legs wider, but Kihyun has him trapped, bracketed between his thighs, but even the restriction encourages Changkyun, he seems incapable of shutting up — Kihyun starts thinking of makeshift gags, but neither of them is wearing a tie, and both of his own hands are otherwise occupied. So he kisses him instead, and Changkyun’s muffled moans are frantic and his body is tightening under Kihyun’s, and Kihyun thrusts against him as if he’s inside him, with intent, with enough force to push Changkyun back on the marble, until Changkyun begins to curl in on himself and all but sobs into Kihyun’s mouth and he comes, shaking, panting, trying in vain to break the kiss so he can breathe. But Kihyun won’t let him go — single-minded, possessive, he keeps kissing him though Changkyun can’t kiss back anymore, to the point that Changkyun’s wet, whimpery little noises start to become hyperventilation and finally Kihyun releases him and lets him gasp his wordless gratitude.

And at first Kihyun thinks the selfish creature will leave it at that, since he’s seemingly so weak now, dazed and thoroughly ravished, but Changkyun’s love wins out, he manages to pull his wrist free from Kihyun’s hold and, with his fumbling fingers, open Kihyun’s belt and trousers. His eyes are heavy-lidded, and he looks more in love than Kihyun has seen since their wedding day, starry, devout, miles away and hyperpresent all at once. Kihyun blames it on the rush of post-orgasm endorphins, then tucks his face into Changkyun’s neck and breathes him in, lets Changkyun jerk his dripping cock tight and tense the way he likes it sometimes. Another minute, and Kihyun’s eyelashes shudder against the skin above Changkyun’s jugular and he spills over Changkyun’s hand, his trousers, the hem of his shirt, with no regard for dignity, not with Changkyun’s breath so faint and grateful above him. And once he’s done, Changkyun’s other arm comes up again, cast over Kihyun’s back, to hold him close as they both return to Earth.

Kihyun’s head clears miraculously quickly. He peels Changkyun’s hands away from him and slides back, sits up, looks over Changkyun’s disheveled form with clinical detachment. Changkyun is an absolute wreck, his hair a mess, shirt undone — yes, Kihyun had inadvertently torn a button, and he has no regrets, he’d do it again — and completely ruined below the belt. Kihyun fixes his own trousers, then comes down off of the island to stand, adjusting the cuffs of his shirt and smoothing his hair back where Changkyun’s fingers had disturbed it. “Clean this up,” he says, his voice even. His hands had been so unsteady before he’d yanked Changkyun to him, but now they’re still again, and he feels better about the stove having been left on. That lesson has certainly now been taught. “Then come to bed.”

It may be a trick of the light, but it looks like Changkyun is smiling. God, he came so hard it knocked his brain loose. Kihyun doesn’t bother sticking around to confirm the rest of his reaction, just goes upstairs, undoing the buttons of his shirt as he walks. Changkyun looks better like that, Kihyun decides, debauched and ditzy, than he does when he’s pining after Kihyun and gazing after him with his perpetually moonlit eyes. Much more tolerable. Kihyun strips, washes his face, and gets in bed, and all the while he’s noting how good he feels overall, so much calmer, that buzz under his skin and in his head very nearly silenced. That itch, his boredom, mostly sated. The answer had been right in front of him all along — and hasn’t Changkyun always been his lifeline away from his problems, ever since he started this whole moribund adventure? 

By the time Changkyun enters the room, Kihyun is pretending to be asleep. Pretty convincingly, too, as Changkyun doesn’t attempt to talk to him, just continues through to the bathroom. This feeling Kihyun is having is dangerously close to contentment, but contentment will make him complacent, will make him forget who he is and what he’s here to do. Changkyun slips into bed by his side, and when he’s settled in the sheets and still, Kihyun turns over, kisses him briefly, cleanly, on the mouth, then turns away again. And for once Changkyun doesn’t want to talk; Kihyun seems to have given him enough of what he wanted. That makes two of them, then. 

And all of a sudden Kihyun’s life has newfound purpose. He makes himself scarce in the morning, doesn’t bother waiting around for Changkyun to stir awake for their requisite breakfast hour together, just takes his car and goes to the city. Ignoring him is fun, Kihyun is a big believer in the silent treatment, but last night — Changkyun had been oddly receptive, had given into Kihyun so easily, and Kihyun very nearly rear-ends the Nissan in front of him, too distracted thinking about that look Changkyun had gotten when Kihyun had told him to be quiet at dinner, the look on his face when Kihyun had left him on the kitchen island, so blissful. God, the bait-and-switch. Changkyun leading Kihyun on thinking he needed his husband to be sweet, or else his fragile pride would bruise. But no, he’s always needed a firmer hand, and Kihyun is more than happy to provide. After all, Changkyun deserves it. He was warned. It’s all just passing time, procrastinating his demise. Kihyun won’t let him go gentle. Not after this.

Kihyun finds a rooftop bar open for brunch on weekdays, then eats fresh fruit and drinks his morning coffee with a book, feet kicked up on a pouf and phone on mute in case Changkyun dares to disturb his paradise. If Changkyun thinks this is a game, Kihyun will change up the rules, never let him get comfortable. Kihyun’s ennui has taken on a new color, all part of his ongoing torment of his witless husband, and before the torment was a side effect, a cherry on top, but now it’s the main course — Changkyun deserves it. 

After about two hours, Kihyun checks his phone to find three missed calls from Changkyun, no voicemail, and a text: _Painters are here. _Fuck, Kihyun had honestly forgotten in his haste to get out of the house that he was having the entire second floor repainted, starting today. He had selected a company carefully and picked colors ahead of time, so his presence is perfunctory at best, but what if the workers on-site have a question? Whom are they going to turn to for guidance, _Changkyun? _As fucking if. Immensely displeased, Kihyun pays for his exorbitant brunch, then gets back in the car and heads back home, fuming the whole way. Is this oversight, strictly speaking, Changkyun’s fault? No, but Kihyun needs someone else to blame, some kind of outlet for his myriad frustrations. The picture that the painters’ van makes, parked in their driveway, big and ungainly and covered in dust, only serves to incense him more, and he can’t believe he’s still mad about last night — he’d thought he’d gotten it out of his system, but evidently not, that must be the reason he’s so steamed up, and he goes in through the garage, the unlocked door within, and his scowl darkens past stormcloud levels when he sees tarps laid down over his gorgeous marble staircase and running through his otherwise pristine entryway. Still, he supposes that’s better than mud being everywhere. He makes his way upstairs to speak to whoever’s in charge of the painting crew, and though he feels his phone buzz in his pocket with a text from Changkyun, no doubt checking if he’s at least on his way back home, he ignores it. 

A thirty-second conversation with the painters confirms his suspicions; he’s not necessary to the process, as he’d been extremely clear while booking this paint job, leaving no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation. They’re nearly done for the day, in fact, should be wrapping up within the next half-hour. Great, now the house is going to smell like paint and make Kihyun’s permanent headache that much worse. “You haven’t seen my husband lurking around here, have you?” he asks a painter, deceptively sunny, and is directed to the third floor. What business does Changkyun have on the third floor? Probably napping, the louche. Kihyun goes up to find him, that perfect, emotionless smile he puts on for strangers vanishing completely by the time he’s at the top of the stairs, and from there he’s pushing in every door to every guest room and walk-in closet until, finally, he finds him in the last spare room at the end of the corridor, sitting horizontally with his legs across the side of a plush armchair by the window and looking very startled indeed.

“What are you doing?” Kihyun asks just as Changkyun says, “Oh, I didn’t know you were back.”

Kihyun just looks at him, and once he’s satisfied that Changkyun won’t try to talk again until Kihyun says his piece, he says, “The painters are downstairs, possibly wreaking havoc on our home. Why aren’t you supervising?”

“I tried,” Changkyun says, closing his book so he can better focus on Kihyun, so eager to appease, to please, “but they said you had it covered and I’d just be in the way.”

Kihyun barely holds back a laugh and comes into the room, half-closing the door behind him. “You should have told me they were here sooner, then I could have saved you the trouble.”

Never mind that Changkyun had called him three times right after Kihyun’s departure, presumably as soon as they’d gotten there, and Kihyun hadn’t been answering. Changkyun just nods ruefully, sets the book aside, and Kihyun still isn’t happy with him, not at all, but he’s right there for the taking, so Kihyun takes, slipping into his lap and winding his arms around his shoulders. “What have you been up to today?” Changkyun murmurs, tilting his head up in expectation of a kiss, and Kihyun doesn’t give him what he wants, chooses instead to brush his hair back from his face and tug at the longer strands. “I missed you this morning.”

“I went out,” Kihyun says. “And then I had to come _all _the way back, just when I was starting to have a lovely time.”

“I’m sorry,” Changkyun says softly. “I wish I’d known they were coming, I would have called them and rescheduled.” He very gently runs his hand up Kihyun’s side, a pale echo of his frantic efforts to get Kihyun undressed yesterday evening, and adds, “But I’m glad to have you home.”

Why can’t he just go back to being quiet? That was so much nicer. Kihyun uses his light hold on Changkyun’s hair to tip his head towards himself, and this time he does grant him a kiss, more to silence him than anything else. Changkyun kisses back but without the passion Kihyun was hoping for, so Kihyun kisses more insistently, tongue pushing past his narrow lips, and Changkyun makes the smallest of sounds in reluctant protest. 

“Kihyun— the painters are downstairs,” he whispers, and Kihyun huffs, annoyed, his grip in Changkyun’s hair tightening to a cruel extent.

“So?” he replies and kisses him again. “Go shut the door if it bothers you that much.”

Changkyun is very obviously being held prisoner in his chair due to Kihyun having claimed his rightful place in his lap and has no choice but to relent, and this time when Kihyun kisses him, his response is what Kihyun was waiting for, opening up and blooming under Kihyun’s touches. “Since when have you been shy?” Kihyun continues, remembering his irritation, how fucking mad he’d been when he got home. Changkyun had somehow managed to distract him, but now Kihyun remembers his purpose, now he’s back on track, now he’ll see this through. “We’re _married_. They know what we do. You weren’t shy at all in Europe.”

“We were usually more secluded,” Changkyun says, not as defensive as over his choice of road but still standing up for himself in his own meek little way. “And you— you usually make me get so loud.”

Kihyun, frustrated and impatient, pulls out of his lap to stand and grabs the collar of Changkyun’s cashmere sweater instead, can’t help but notice that he’s paired the sweater, which is actually quite nice, with casual joggers, like the degenerate that he is. “Then you’d better find a way to keep it down,” he says. 

Changkyun is so good at reading Kihyun’s mind when it counts. He follows him out of the chair, but instead of standing, he drops directly to his knees, looking up at Kihyun with undisguised adoration. “I can think of a couple,” he says, and he’s got this all _wrong, _Kihyun can _tell _he still sees himself as playing a game, and yet Kihyun does nothing to stop him as Changkyun palms over Kihyun’s rapidly growing bulge, then leans in, eyelashes fluttering hot and coy, to mouth the fabric of his trousers. It’s dirty and depraved, hardly sanitary, but it makes Kihyun dizzy with arousal to see Changkyun debase himself like this, so eager for his cock that he’ll suck on anything he can get. In retrospect, knowing how much Changkyun adores oral, it’s almost surprising that he hasn’t done anything like this before, but it seems Changkyun is full of surprises. He looks seconds away from essaying to undo his zipper with his teeth, or, more likely, just laving his tongue mindlessly over Kihyun’s clothed cock, and Kihyun hisses at him in disapproval and pushes his face away lightly so he can open the button and fly himself and give Changkyun what he has hardly earned, but clearly needs. 

Changkyun’s expression is unbearable. Kihyun is so annoyed by his dewy-lidded worship, the way he stares up at Kihyun like Kihyun is the only thing he’s ever seen, so infuriated by the love and eagerness and patience Changkyun radiates each time he lifts his lashes, and if the eyes are the windows to the soul, Kihyun is investing all his money in blinds. “Eyes shut, mouth open,” he says, low, his hand finding Changkyun’s hair again and grasping tight. 

A shudder tears through Changkyun’s whole body and he obeys _instantly, _offering himself to Kihyun just as Kihyun had commanded, and Kihyun rubs his cock on Changkyun’s wet lower lip to watch him bat his tongue for it in vain, then thrusts inside. God, that mouth. The things Kihyun would do. And _can _do, it seems like, as Changkyun’s jaw is slack and his eyebrows are furrowed in concentration and Kihyun knows without needing to check that he’s got a hand between his legs to rub himself, to take the edge away, so Kihyun fucks into the receptive heat of his lips, further back into his throat, because he knows Changkyun can take it. Changkyun swallows around him, his eyes obediently closed, and Kihyun gives him just a moment to breathe before he begins to fuck his mouth in earnest. Changkyun’s responding groan is faint, and one hand, just one, comes up to hold Kihyun’s thigh for some stability. And even though Kihyun has him completely powerless, he still manages to pull off a trick or two, his tongue dragging tightly over Kihyun’s frenulum when Kihyun draws back, his lips sucking hungrily to pull Kihyun deeper on the in-thrust. Kihyun can’t even remember how long he’s wanted to do this to him for, and having it is so different than imagining it — it’s so much better, almost too good, Kihyun has to cover his own mouth and bite his knuckles to keep from making noise. 

For Changkyun’s best efforts to be quiet, Kihyun can still hear his muffled whimpers, the greedy way he whines when Kihyun gives him the chance to take a breath. Kihyun had wanted to focus on himself, Changkyun is always so auxiliary to his pleasure, but he can’t tear his eyes away from the sight Changkyun makes on his knees like this, his cheeks flushed, his hair inexorably tight in Kihyun’s grip, his mouth nothing but an eager recipient for Kihyun’s cock, and even though he can no longer look up at Kihyun with all his usual veneration, Kihyun can still feel it coming off him in waves. Something about the way he trembles when Kihyun fucks against the back of his throat, maybe, or the unrelenting grip he has on Kihyun’s thigh. Even on his knees letting Kihyun fuck his mouth, he loves him just as fervently as he ever does, if not more so. Kihyun forces himself to stop for a moment, pulling out of his mouth, only to see Changkyun’s reaction; sure enough, he whines like he’s been shot, almost like it causes him pain to stop getting Kihyun off, and tries to lean closer, seeks blindly for him with his fucked-out puffy lips, until Kihyun takes pity and fills his mouth again. 

His devotion is incredible. So is the slick, hot pressure of his tongue along the underside of Kihyun’s cock, the way he’s choking for once, but not from the push of Kihyun’s dick down his throat, just from how he keeps forgetting to breathe, too single-mindedly focused on the task at hand. So tireless, so determined, even with Kihyun holding the back of his skull perfectly tight to make him stay where he is, he still struggles to take more, to give more, and Kihyun’s self-restraint is beginning to run low. He thinks if he prevented Changkyun from making him come, the idiot might actually _cry, _and as interesting as that prospect may be in a distant, maybe-next-time kind of way, Kihyun does want to come, Changkyun knows how to get him there, and Kihyun relaxes the pressure on his head just long enough for Changkyun to correctly guess what Kihyun is giving him permission to do. 

From there it’s even easier for both of them; Changkyun is sloppy but devastatingly practiced, and he keeps his hands where they are, using nothing but his mouth and the motions of his head to suck Kihyun until Kihyun’s vision blurs. And though Kihyun works hard to silence himself, he can’t help a low groan as he finally comes, but the noise is further concealed by the slam of the front door. The painters have left. Breathing hard, Kihyun pulls out of Changkyun’s mouth, places a fingertip under Changkyun’s chin to close his jaw for him, and softly says, “You hear that?”

Changkyun, desperate, squirming on his knees with his hand curled helplessly around his dick through his joggers, nods. He’s probably seconds away from coming, too, but Kihyun isn’t done toying with him yet, he sinks down to join him on the floor, presses a hand to Changkyun’s shoulder to make him fall back. Changkyun goes easily, but he’s visibly needy, impatient, waiting for Kihyun’s deliverance, and Kihyun notes with interest that his eyes are still closed. For good measure, Kihyun grasps Changkyun’s forearm and pulls his grip away from his cock, and Changkyun whimpers loudly, then snaps his mouth shut and reddens. 

“It’s alright,” Kihyun smiles. He’s so easily manipulable, it’s nearly sweet. “You can make as much noise as you want.”

Changkyun’s moan of relief and gratitude is immediate, and he pushes his hips up against nothing, straining for a touch that isn’t there. Kihyun releases his arm and slides his palm down Changkyun’s lower stomach, watches his trapped cock twitch in his sweats, takes pity on him for the second time today — that’s a bad sign — and grabs him directly and firmly. He’s dripping, he’s so fucking hard, and when Kihyun pushes his fingers down over the head and lets Changkyun fuck into his fist, Changkyun moans again, his poor overstimulated body a mess of shudders, half-underneath Kihyun on the rug. “Will you fuck me?” he pants. 

“Take what I’m giving you,” Kihyun says, amused by him making requests as though he has any power in this situation. But if Changkyun is going to try to take liberties, Kihyun needs to nip that habit in the bud now before it gets any worse. Not a game. Changkyun won’t win. He’s completely at Kihyun’s mercy, he always has been but now he’s starting to see it, too, and he’s— well, he’s groaning and his cock throbs in Kihyun’s hand in response to his words, and Kihyun can only hope he’s getting the right meaning. 

Changkyun is always on a hair-trigger after he sucks Kihyun off, so Kihyun, not wanting this to be over too soon, slows his strokes, and Changkyun whines and tries in vain to get him to continue. “What’s your hurry?” Kihyun asks, slowing his hand to a complete halt, just barely rubbing his ring finger over the head of Changkyun’s cock. “You going somewhere? No, sweetheart, you’re not going anywhere, are you?” 

“No,” Changkyun whines. “No, I’m not— Kihyun, please, will you give me more if I’m quiet?”

“Why would you need to be quiet?” Kihyun shrugs. He flicks his thumb at the sensitive vein running along the underside and Changkyun yelps, his hands jumping up to seize Kihyun’s shoulders. “I told you. Be as loud as you want. It’s not going to help.”

“Help?” Changkyun says, struggling. “Help what?”

“You,” Kihyun says. He leans down to kiss him on his trembling mouth, bites his lower lip, yanks back too hard, makes Changkyun whine again, higher and needier. “There’s no neighbors around for miles, I could do anything to you, nobody would come if they heard you calling, so go ahead, make noise, see what happens.”

“Fuck,” Changkyun moans. Kihyun wants him delirious to a breaking point, so he starts to jerk him off again and Changkyun’s body twists and his noise is like a raw sob in the back of his already-raw throat. “Fuck _yes, _yes yes yes, don’t stop, you can— you can do anything, you can do anything to me, Kihyun, just don’t stop—”

Kihyun had had distant intentions of fingering him, but that doesn’t even seem like it’ll be necessary with him in this condition. Can he get that second-to-last part in writing, please? Entertained by this thought, whether Changkyun’s fevered, lust-fuelled request would be sufficient legal recourse for Kihyun’s defense lawyer if he ever makes it to trial, Kihyun kisses him through his weak whimpers and doesn’t stop stroking him, keeps his grip on the knife’s edge of too tight, and Changkyun’s fingers claw at the fabric of Kihyun’s shirt and he comes like he can’t even help it, like it surprises him, too, his eyes flying wide open and his moans hazy needy little things against Kihyun’s mouth. 

_This must be how a phoenix feels, _Kihyun thinks, _when it rises from the ashes. _He pulls his hand out of Changkyun’s joggers to leave him ruined once again, second day in a row. This is a trend Kihyun could get used to. Almost kindly, but not quite, he runs his hand over the soft space between Changkyun’s thighs, and the motion of the fabric of his joggers rubbing against his oversensitive cock makes Changkyun whimper, his body giving a faint, reflexive jerk. He always goes so pink after he comes, and this is no different, that delicate flush stealing down from his cheeks to his neck, and Kihyun pulls away without kissing him again and sits up. “They better not have gotten paint on the window frames,” he mutters. 

Changkyun is breathing heavily and he makes a bleary, confused noise, his hands reaching feebly for Kihyun. “Wanna go check?”

“I’m going to go check, yes,” Kihyun says, the intentional exclusion crisp in his tone. “Then I want lunch. Any progress on the chef?”

“Oh, um,” Changkyun says. This is a lot of thinking and accountability right after he’s come, and Kihyun enjoys his vacant expression, the way he’s clearly struggling to connect his thoughts together. “Yeah, I found a couple options, I wanted to run them by you. Maybe have them come over for some trial runs?”

“Just take care of it,” Kihyun dismisses. “You know what kind of food I like.” Unfortunate, but true. Changkyun evidently seems to think this is a trick, based on the way his eyes fill with self-doubt, but to his own dismay, Kihyun really means it, not that it makes any difference. He stands, and in the process of considering whether to offer his hand to Changkyun to help him up off the ground, he does it anyway. Changkyun’s fingers grasp clumsily at his own and he pulls himself first to his knees, then to his feet, swaying unsteadily and giving Kihyun a heavy-lidded, warm smile. 

Kihyun doesn’t hold his hand for longer than he has to. Or spend a second longer in his company than he has to; those days are decisively in the past. This had been a trial run of sorts, a litmus test to see how Changkyun will react to Kihyun’s acidity. And Changkyun had treated him with his usual diffidence, completely deferring to Kihyun’s demands and instruction, just as grateful when Kihyun is cruel as when he’s sweet. All over again Kihyun is furious with him for leading Kihyun on for all this time, and any plan he’d had to possibly grace Changkyun with his presence for another hour or so today vanishes completely. In fact, any further mercy vanishes along with it. Kihyun won’t let him go gentle, no, but that doesn’t mean he has to _talk _to him. He turns sharply and leaves the room, leaves Changkyun alone, and that decides it — being intentionally harsh, going out of his way to make Changkyun’s existence miserable as Kihyun counts down the bloody days, would be tiring for them both, and Changkyun would likely not even appreciate Kihyun’s efforts. He hadn’t committed enough to ignoring him the first time. They’d still spent mornings and evenings together and Kihyun had texted Changkyun back and watched TV with him and curled up close in bed. No longer, no more. What reason does Kihyun have to speak to him? To spend time with him? He has movies of his own to watch. Books of his own to read. Although most of those boxes are still packed, and Kihyun frankly can’t be bothered to go through the whole exhausting process of tearing open the tape holding them shut, remembering his organizational system, finding the perfect location for each book, et cetera. He’ll hire someone to unpack them once Changkyun is out of his way. 

Kihyun’s mission is unchanged, and his newfound purpose very much the force driving him to pledge himself to this decision. His previous attempt at cutting down on Changkyun’s contact with him had proven his assumptions right — Changkyun does wilt if unwatered by attention, but even the slightest hint of sustenance from Kihyun revives him wholly. Cold turkey it is, then. He confirms that the window frames are, in fact, untarnished by paint, and continues through the house to take a shower, just for the sake of staving off his boredom and avoiding Changkyun. Once inside, he is very irritated to find that Changkyun drew, at some point, a little heart with their initials on the glass shower wall just like he’d done the first time Kihyun saw his apartment, and over the next iteration of steam, the drawing had solidified. Imbecile. The only thing preventing Kihyun from swiping it away with his palm is his immediate self-comparison to some melodramatic cartoon villain, so he leaves it where it is, but concludes his shower early, resenting Changkyun every second of the way. And after, he slips out of the bathroom and then bedroom to take up residence in one of the other spare rooms, this one an office, with his laptop, investigating nearby parks with deep gullies, vacation destinations for after he’s gotten it done. He can hear Changkyun moving around, doing things, so he puts in his incredibly expensive noise-cancelling earbuds and ignores him even more intensely. And that works for a couple of hours until he gets hungry in earnest and goes to the kitchen, thankfully devoid of simple-minded husbands, to prepare himself a ham-and-pesto focaccia on his brand-new Smeg panini press. What is Changkyun doing during all of this? He doesn’t have any hobbies or interests beyond bothering Kihyun. Kihyun can’t imagine, and also couldn’t care less. And his research keeps him busy through the evening, until the sun is long since set, and the house is quiet, still, but it breathes with Changkyun’s life, and even though he’s silent, Kihyun still knows he’s there. It grates on him, to the point that he plugs in his laptop for the night and comes along to bed, where Changkyun has taken up his usual spot already, complaisant and calm with all his pillows and his nighttime New Yorker. 

He looks so defenseless, and in every way, he is, of course. Kihyun hasn’t even done anything to him yet, isn’t planning to for another two weeks or so, but Changkyun is primed and ready, a well-seasoned steak approaching a searing-hot grill. “You okay?” Changkyun asks softly, and Kihyun doesn’t answer. He leaves his clothes in the laundry hamper and joins Changkyun in bed, but doesn’t talk to him, doesn’t touch him, and when Changkyun turns off the light, learned helplessness kicking in, or possibly just not wanting to offend Kihyun’s clearly bruised sensibilities, he doesn’t protest. Tomorrow is a new day — more of the same.

More of the same, and ignoring Changkyun is easier when it’s Kihyun’s only mechanism of destruction. They have breakfast together, silent, and Kihyun carries himself like he’s waiting for an apology long overdue and Changkyun just eats his soft-boiled egg and seems bemused, bruised. It feels different than the first time Kihyun had decided on ignoring him; back then, he’d been willing to play along with Changkyun’s notions that there was anything left to salvage in their marriage, he’d returned smiles, he’d initiated kisses. Give-and-take, balance, to keep Changkyun content. Fuck that and fuck him. Kihyun is sick of his hard work going unacknowledged, and that neat little eight-five ratio Kihyun had labored to create is useless now. He’ll spend precisely as much time at home as he sees fit and not a second more. Fuck Changkyun’s comfort. Fuck his hopes and dreams. He clenches his jaw and forces himself to stay silent as Changkyun reads the newspaper at the breakfast table and comments, absently but incorrectly, on a piece of political reporting; doesn’t respond to Changkyun’s soft-voiced query about when he’ll be back today, if at all; departs in his Porsche without so much as a by-your-leave. Feeling reckless, he calls Minhyuk and leaves him a voicemail inviting him to come hang out in the city sometime, an invitation either one of them is unlikely to follow up on. For lack of absolutely anything better to do, he goes shopping again, this time for furniture as much as clothes. Arranges for everything to be delivered, then makes his way to Tesla — even though his appointment isn’t until the day after tomorrow — to harass them until they let him talk to an expert and design his car today. The house has a six-car garage, he may as well use it. It’s not like Changkyun is going to contribute; he doesn’t care about cars, or about style or flair in general. 

When he gets home, Changkyun is in the main living room, flipping through Columbia’s alumni magazine and drinking chamomile tea. Like a puppy left abandoned for days on end, his head jerks up at the sound of the door, ears perked, face bright and happy. Kihyun’s eyes slide over him, then past, and he takes off his jacket and hangs it on the bronze rack by the entryway. Without a word to Changkyun or even another look his way, he goes upstairs. Changkyun doesn’t follow. _Is that it? _Kihyun thinks. _It was that easy all along? _Rough him up a little with a messy blowjob and don’t talk to him at breakfast and his spirit is broken, just like that? It’s only been a day, but Kihyun can feel Changkyun’s loneliness despite the fact, permeating the room, the house. An insect that flew inside of its own accord and now can’t take the very same exit out to freedom. Kihyun reaches for the metaphorical flyswatter, tightens his chokehold, and does it all over again the next day.

And the next day is even simpler, Changkyun talks to him much less over breakfast, and that’s two days, two nights since Kihyun divorced himself from insincerity, and he likes this so much better than everything he was doing before. He’s always contended that Changkyun is at his most tolerable when he’s silent, so now he finds him very tolerable indeed. Three days, then four, then five. Changkyun no longer tries to talk to him, but he does still watch him with his big plaintive eyes and wait for something better, something Kihyun will never give him. Why not kill him at the end of the week? It’ll be easy enough. Even if Changkyun is surprised by the sudden invitation to go for a walk together, or to have a drink together, even if it seems out of character for this new and improved Kihyun, it’s not like the police will be able to ask his corpse any questions. That evening, pleased by thoughts of Changkyun’s mortality, Kihyun kisses Changkyun on the cheek while passing, and Changkyun drops a mug in surprise. Kihyun idly watches him clean up the shards, then bandages the tip of his index finger for him, cut on a piece of porcelain. How fitting. 

“Do you think it needs Neosporin or anything?” Changkyun murmurs, talking so softly, like he doesn’t want to scare Kihyun off. “Or is it not that bad?”

“I think it’s fine,” Kihyun says. His hands remain on Changkyun’s for a beat longer than they have to and he rapidly pulls them away once he notices. This is the longest conversation they’ve had in days, and Changkyun looks just as surprised by it as Kihyun feels. 

“I’ll replace the mug,” Changkyun offers tentatively. “I know you liked that set.”

Kihyun huffs. “Did I? I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about it.”

“Oh,” Changkyun says. “You— you said you liked it. Once.”

“I say a lot of things once,” Kihyun says, can’t help it, openly mocking. “Are we done playing doctor?”

Changkyun, disheartened, nods. “Thank you,” he says, cradling his hand to his chest as though it’s seriously injured, not barely scraped. “Um— sorry.”

Kihyun rolls his eyes at him. “Does it still hurt?”

“Not really,” Changkyun says, experimentally squeezing the tip of his bandaged finger with his other hand. “Ow.”

“Well, don’t _do _that,” Kihyun says and grabs his hand away again. Changkyun makes a small startled noise but doesn’t protest, just looks at Kihyun with his inscrutable, lonely eyes. “You’ll only make it worse. It needs to heal.”

“That’s what the Band-Aid is for,” Changkyun points out, uncertain.

“The Band-Aid,” Kihyun says, “_covers _the problem. It doesn’t _heal the wound. _That’s the whole point.”

“I asked if you thought it needed Neosporin—”

“Which is an antibiotic, not a magical _healing ointment—_”

“—and you said no!”

“You can do whatever you want,” Kihyun says. It no longer feels like they’re talking about the Band-Aid and the admittedly minuscule cut on Changkyun’s finger— Changkyun had gone typically woozy at the sight of his own blood and of course Kihyun had had no choice but to intervene— but he doesn’t know what they _would _be talking about. Surely they’re mad about different things. Changkyun’s not even mad, just bewildered and confrontational, and Kihyun is starting to know how this goes by now, can practically see exactly what’ll happen next. Third time’s the fucking charm. They’ve both become hilariously predictable, and instead of breaking character, going against script, he takes his cue, pushes the center of Changkyun’s chest to make him back up flush to the settee, tugs him down, straddles his lap, frowns at him even as Changkyun’s face begins to light up with familiar fire. “I couldn’t care less. So you can make your own decisions and make your own mistakes, but don’t expect me to help with the consequences.”

Definitely not talking about the cut finger anymore. Changkyun swallows heavily, his hands coming up to hold Kihyun’s hips, and the fabric of Kihyun’s woven-silk evening shirt is so thin that he can feel the rough canvas of the Band-Aid against his skin. “Which are?” he prompts. 

“Why would I tell you,” Kihyun says, leans in to kiss him, carnivore’s teeth to Changkyun’s prey-animal lips, “when I could just show you?”

Underneath him, Changkyun’s full body shivers, and Kihyun kisses him until it doesn’t matter at all what they were ever talking about in the first place, what excuse they’ve both come up with this time — they know why they’re here, what they want. Evenly-matched opponents on a rigged playing field, and even when Kihyun is inside him, Changkyun gasping and writhing and coming with a cry of Kihyun’s name on his decadent lips, he can’t help but feel that he still doesn’t know who has turned out to be the winner.

_MONTH 19_

All of a sudden Kihyun realizes he was supposed to kill him last month, but didn’t. Interesting. A bump in the road but nothing devastating; he’ll just have to readjust his calendar, recalibrate, get back on track. He’s been busy, anyway.

Kihyun’s new game is denial. Changkyun has turned out to be as much fun to tease as he is to ignore, and so Kihyun makes Changkyun sit on the chaise at the other side of the room, watching with voracious, fever-flushed eyes as Kihyun twists in pleasure on the bed, his fingers scissoring inside himself, an arrogant tilt to his body as he spreads his legs wider to show Changkyun what he’s missing. 

“Please let me touch you,” Changkyun breathes, his voice so raspy, so whiny, but Kihyun wants him past the point of being able to verbalize his desires, and it’s not like he won’t edge Changkyun for the better part of an hour when he finally grants him access to the bed, so Changkyun’s requests are all in vain. The only purpose they serve, in fact, is causing Kihyun to intensify his efforts, he does always like to hear Changkyun’s hoarse-voiced sincerity, especially when they’re fucking, and he just flashes Changkyun a mean, pretty smile, rubs the fingers of his other hand over the head of his dick until he’s shivering, and Changkyun’s cheeks are so warm, his eyes are so dark, and his hand starts inching closer to his lap. Kihyun primly clicks his tongue and Changkyun stops, shifts where he sits, cheeks reddening in shame at having been caught, and exhales a frustrated breath.

“If you touch yourself, I won’t let you make me come,” Kihyun hums, more smug than ever. 

“Okay,” Changkyun mumbles. Resentful, but not disobedient. He shifts again. Kihyun wonders how much it would take for Changkyun to decide he’s had enough of Kihyun’s teasing; there’s nothing physically keeping him on the chaise (although perhaps there ought to be, Kihyun will consider it for next time), he could disobey Kihyun and come over at any moment and take what’s rightfully his, but he won’t. They both know he won’t. But the possibility, among other things, is what keeps this game worth playing.

It’s been interesting, breaking him in like a new pair of boots. No wonder Kihyun forgot about his schedule — Changkyun makes for a very suitable distraction. The last time they played like this, Kihyun relented after half an hour and let Changkyun lick him out and come across his thighs, because his sick fixation on Kihyun’s legs has only strengthened with the progression of their marriage, and Kihyun grudgingly tolerates it, the way Changkyun shakes with adoration and licks Kihyun clean and looks at him the way the ancients must have looked at the moon, fearful and obsessed. This time, he’s hoping to last longer before he gets bored, not wanting to give Changkyun ideas about his own importance. But his patience is running thin and Changkyun is so visibly hard and Kihyun can only do so much with his own two fingers, for as much as he loves to stroke his cock light and loose and say, “See, _this _is how I like it, you always do it wrong,” while Changkyun apologizes and swears over and over that he’ll do better, then does it the exact same way as always when Kihyun gives him another chance. Really, the only problem with the way he usually does it is that it gets Kihyun off too quickly, which, again, bolsters Changkyun’s already tumescent ego. Somehow Kihyun’s plan to crumble Changkyun’s resolve and will to live has only strengthened him, but maybe that’s less Kihyun’s daily cruelty and more their newfound sexual dynamic. At least it’s something to do, Kihyun tells himself. There’s only so much shopping and fine dining he can partake in before he runs out. But Changkyun’s well will never, ever run dry.

“Come here,” he relents, tilting his head to the side and drawing his fingers out of himself, and Changkyun moves so quickly to obey that he very nearly trips over his own legs and falls, but he stops in time, making it to the bed and putting his body all over Kihyun’s, his hands everywhere, the hot, heavy press of his cock searing between Kihyun’s thighs. Kihyun affects boredom, lies back with his legs opened to him and no further encouragement, but Changkyun doesn’t need encouragement, he’s already been given what he wants. He pushes inside, Kihyun perfectly stretched for him, and Kihyun’s icy composure falters for a moment, a breathy noise punched out of his lungs, and he covers his mouth but it’s too late, Changkyun heard, and his responding smile is absolutely brilliant as he fits himself fully within Kihyun, his straining cock giving a throb that Kihyun can actually feel. 

Kihyun drapes his arms around Changkyun’s shoulders and lets his nails dig into the back of his neck. Changkyun always wants to be close to him, that’s as much a reason why he whines and strains at his invisible bonds when Kihyun denies him touch as the simple physical necessity of his arousal, and when Kihyun gives in, he’s so relieved, so contented, so amazed. “Thank you,” he invariably gasps out, means it more and more each time. “That’s— that’s so good, Kihyun, thank you.”

“Hurry up,” Kihyun sighs, absently bites at Changkyun’s jaw when he leans down to brace himself on his elbows, propped unsteadily above Kihyun while his hips piston inside him. It’s so good, it’s so deep and satisfying on every level, and what makes it all the sweeter is how long Changkyun was willing to wait, how Kihyun knows he’d stop again in an instant if Kihyun gave him the word. Kihyun closes his eyes and lets the feeling wash over him, of total control, of complete and utter _possession_, and comes just like that, his hand going tight on his dick and Changkyun, subservient, fucking Kihyun exactly how he needs it to keep the aftershocks of pleasure going until Kihyun pushes him off. 

Will he be kind enough to let Changkyun come inside him today? No, he will not. He puts Changkyun under him, spread helpless on his back, and teases his cock with his fingers and kitten-licks of his tongue, and three months ago this would have been an unthinkable extreme, so much further into _kink _than any of their previous juvenile, clumsy copulation, but now it’s— well, not boring, but certainly commonplace, the way Changkyun’s body twitches and Kihyun digs his fingers into his hipbone to keep him down and ignores Changkyun’s pleas for more, for any kind of relief. This is, perhaps, what Kihyun was waiting for all along, what all his assignations of Changkyun to the role of nothing more than a living sex toy predicted, because now the self-fulfilling prophecy is finally fulfilled and Kihyun uses Changkyun for anything and everything, any whim he has, then leaves him where he found him until he’s ready to unlock the toy chest once again. Changkyun doesn’t mind. In fact, he loves it, and Kihyun sees that strange, alight look in his eyes more than any other these days, though he’d never seen it even once before their wedding. Kihyun can’t help but feel like maybe Changkyun is still getting his wires crossed, but he doesn’t care enough to correct him. Things are fine the way they are.

Sometimes fine, sometimes better than ever before. Kihyun has finally come into his own, risen fully to the zenith of his powers, unhindered by propriety or politeness. He spends exactly as little time with Changkyun as he wants, ignores him the rest of the day, lives life how _he _wants to, how he knows he deserves. The waiters at the Plaza and the Ritz know him by name. He ran out of space in the master closet and expanded out to one of the guest rooms, having a whole armoire installed just to hold his new collection of blazers. Changkyun doesn’t mind that, either. He doesn’t comment on anything Kihyun does. He regards the shopping bags Kihyun brings home with mild apprehension, always interest, never envy. He must be hoping for a little fashion show, Kihyun dressing up pretty for him in his silk button-downs and cashmere sweaters and jacquard coats, gold threads woven into the fabric of his tees, letting Changkyun touch, maybe dress him back down. Of course he’ll get no such thing; Kihyun is dressing up for himself, not for his flibbertigibbet of a husband to appreciate. 

Changkyun has been taking liberties lately, too, or trying to. The chef he managed to hire, an ambiguously European auntly type named Lena (and Kihyun can’t help but wonder if she was deliberately chosen, someone neither quite matronly comforting nor seductively youthful, in no way a threat to Kihyun’s total control of Changkyun’s existence and mentality), seems to have been given instructions to make all their meals _romantic, _because the table is always set with candles, cutlery for two, when Changkyun knows very well they won’t be conversing at mealtimes so he may as well not even try. More often than not, Kihyun wakes up to find they’re in some way entangled, which he blames on Changkyun’s irrepressibly clingy nature, but it’s not to the point that he wants to make Changkyun sleep separately, not yet. He barely sees Changkyun at all except for when _he _is alright with his presence, even though Changkyun is always asking where he’s going today or attempting to invite himself along, and Kihyun prides himself on his inability to be worn down, nobody has _ever _won his favor through persistence, but Changkyun — there’s just something about him. Kihyun isn’t sure if it’s how he’s practically begging to be murdered or how servile he’s rapidly become, very nearly useful in all his deference, but he actually finds himself considering assenting to one of Changkyun’s quiet queries one of these days, just to see what would happen, just so he could bully him in public and find out if that temper’s still in there somewhere or if Kihyun has quashed it completely over these past few weeks.

What does it is finding Changkyun lurking around near Kihyun’s new closet. “You,” Kihyun says distastefully, and Changkyun turns to see him, face immediately guilty. “What are you doing, snooping in my things?”

“No,” Changkyun says, “I was just passing by.”

He’s wearing a sweater with a hole near the collar, not-quite-well-fitting jeans, and Kihyun’s lip pulls into a faint sneer as he takes in the sorry state Changkyun is always, always in. “Are you jealous or something?” he says. “It’s not like there’s anything keeping _you _from dressing well except your own stubbornness. Also, you can’t borrow any of my new stuff, we’re not _actually _the same size.”

“I wasn’t going to try to borrow any of it,” Changkyun disagrees, soft, careful. “I was just curious. Maybe I’m due for an update to my wardrobe, too.”

Kihyun can’t help a scornful laugh. “I’ve been trying to tell you that for, what, a _year? _God, better late than never, but I don’t know if you can teach yourself new tricks this late in the game.”

“You could help me,” Changkyun says. All of a sudden he’s so hopeful, but visibly hedging his bets, unfolding his plan slowly so as not to make Kihyun balk. “You know what looks good on me better than I do, anyway, and I always look better when you dress me.”

“Unbelievable,” Kihyun mutters. This is, once again, the longest non-sex-related conversation they’ve had in days, and he can see the effect it’s starting to have on Changkyun, so he’d better cut this off before Changkyun starts getting even _more _ideas. “Fine. I was going to go into the city today anyway, so. You can come along. We’ll shop. I’m leaving in fifteen minutes, and if you’re not ready, I’m leaving without you.”

“Okay,” Changkyun says, bright and bubbly and excited, completely disproportionate both to Kihyun’s offer and to Kihyun’s overall treatment. “Okay, I’ll be ready!”

With stakes as high as this, of course he keeps his word, and he’s waiting by the cars before Kihyun even gets there. Great, so he can drive, too. Kihyun breezes by, pressing the keys to the Jaguar into his waiting palm, because fuck it, why not, they may as well have a little fun. Changkyun starts smiling as soon as he sees Kihyun’s choice, unlocks and opens the door for him, and Kihyun slides in like coming home, sighing and getting comfortable right away. It was supposed to be just for special occasions, this car, normally so much tackier than Kihyun’s tastes tend to skew, but he finds himself using this one even more than all the rest. Maybe because, like Changkyun, he customized the build, chose to keep only the features he really wanted and excised the rest, and he doesn’t mind if the end result is a little dramatic. Changkyun is more muted than anything else, though, at least for the moment. God, Kihyun is _brilliant _for this one, finally he’ll get to dress Changkyun the way he should always be dressed, designers and colors and well-tailored lines, and he was right, it really is better late than never. Changkyun doesn’t have to adjust the driver’s seat, he just starts the car and goes, and the only time he speaks is to ask Kihyun _where to._

They begin at Versace. Yes, this was supposed to be a trip to get things for Changkyun, but when Kihyun has a walking clothes rack accompanying him, why waste this opportunity? He fills Changkyun’s arms with merino wool sweaters and velvet jackets, hand-embroidered shirts, understated leather belts, and Changkyun is happy enough, more than happy enough, just to traipse after him. When an employee of the store other than the one currently showing Kihyun a grand tour of the selections offers to ease Changkyun’s burden by taking the items to a private fitting chamber, Changkyun respectfully declines. Kihyun gives him a look for that, somehow endeared while finding him ridiculous, and so the next time someone passes by, Changkyun hands them the clothes practically without looking, eyes fixed on Kihyun as he holds a blood-red blouse up to himself in the mirror. But Kihyun bores of this eventually, too, and makes Changkyun stand still as he compares colors and cuts for him, then sends another employee to drop the broad selection of things Kihyun had picked out in a second fitting room. 

Something Kihyun hadn’t quite predicted, hadn’t quite accounted for, was the effect that seeing Changkyun resplendent in a shape Kihyun wants him bent into would have. Of course that’s all Kihyun’s been doing to him for the past month, but merely psychologically, behaviorally, and any change is only noticeable when they actually interact; it takes an intimate awareness of the before to recognize the after. But any random plebeian could lay an eye on _this _Changkyun and see the difference, and Kihyun first fusses over the top button of his shirt, then makes him do a little turn to demonstrate what those trousers do for his legs — not that _he’s _the one with the fetish, but he’ll take a show where he can get one — and he snaps his fingers at the hovering shopgirls until one brings him a tie patterned, hilariously enough, with bondage belts. Not something Kihyun is normally interested in, but how funny would it be to lash Changkyun’s wrists to the headboard with one of these? He and Changkyun are looking dead in each other’s eyes as Kihyun loops the tie around his neck, tightens the knot, but tugs it loose again before he can drive it to the base of his throat. “It looks cheap,” he declares. “Try the compilation sweater instead.” And Changkyun does, unquestioning, gone from sex doll to dress-up doll all in the span of a day, and then Kihyun lets him try the jacket from off his own back, but he was right about them not being the same size; it dispels the earlier effect Changkyun was manifesting, and Kihyun can exhale in peace and send him back off to change pants without getting distracted in the process.

The problem with Versace is that it _all _looks a certain degree of cheap, and while it might appeal to Changkyun’s tawdry sensibilities, it’s certainly not what Kihyun wanted for him. Gucci suffers from the same dilemma. (Finding Versace cheap didn’t stop Kihyun from getting one of the plainer sweaters for himself, naturally.) So they head to Armani, with Saint Laurent next on the agenda. There, Changkyun looks cozy and broad in a cream-colored cashmere crew-neck, then young and pliant in pale blue jacquard knit, then unfortunately mouth-watering in a sweater with just enough of a V at the neck to show off the edges of his collarbones. Kihyun’s patience is thinning, but before they can head out with all three earlier tops in tow, he grabs an aptly named ‘virgin wool’ coat also for Changkyun, sight practically unseen. He knows it’ll look good, because he knows Changkyun, he knows his body, and that shade of silver with the occasional cutting-through of white always gives Changkyun, otherwise skewing towards the gaunt as of late, a healthy glow. 

At Saint Laurent, they pick out a robe for Changkyun so he can stop haunting the house in something ratty and from Macy’s. Kihyun can still remember the days when Macy’s seemed expensive to him, but he’s trying hard to forget. “See,” Kihyun murmurs over Changkyun’s shoulder, their eyes once again connected but this time in reflection, in the floor-to-ceiling mirror in the fitting room, “this is how you could look all the time.”

Changkyun exhales, watching Kihyun’s hands draw over the fabric at his chest, smooth out the cuffed cotton at his wrists. Are they having fun? Is this what fun is to them, now? Kihyun also remembers the days when he’d pretend for Changkyun, when he’d enjoy Coney Island and a simple scratchy scarf with the Statue of Liberty on it and going _bowling. _This is— preferable, he thinks, because it’s on Kihyun’s terms, it’s the kind of fun he thinks they should be having. But the prospect of Changkyun also enjoying this makes it sour in his throat, and— beyond fun, this is his _existence _now, an endless roster of designer brands, empty names, fashion houses of dubious tastes, and it no longer seems so sweet. Changkyun clearly thinks there’s going to be a little fitting room carousing, but Kihyun has wearied of this completely, and he drops his hands from Changkyun’s body and says, “I’m tired. Take me home.”

In the past, maybe Changkyun would have prodded further. Not to cajole Kihyun into staying, but just to find out what’s wrong, get to the root of the issue, heal it from the heart. But now he doesn’t even nod, just _acts, _changing back into the clothes he’d come in, exiting to hand the robe off to be packaged and purchased, waiting for Kihyun at the door. So accommodating. He must be expecting a reward; he never acts this good. But Kihyun is tired of more than shopping — this is more uninterrupted non-sexual time than he’s spent with Changkyun in a solid month, and he urgently needs some space. Once again, this is another realm in which post-marriage Changkyun is so much preferable to the pre-, as before, he’d surely have insisted on closeness once they returned to their isolated nest, but now, he’ll leave Kihyun free to go about his own devices. He’s even quiet in the car. Temper gone. Kihyun had wanted to make a scene at the store, maybe, but there hadn’t been the right opportunity, and so Changkyun is as meek as ever, driving home in silence.

But it’s not quite meekness, unfortunately. Everything would be so much simpler if it were. He clearly thinks he knows something, that he understands what Kihyun wants from him. Not even Kihyun knows what he wants, though, so it’s impossible for Changkyun to have even a grain of comprehension. They get back to Bronxville and Kihyun leaves Changkyun to carry the bags in, fixing himself a glass of filtered glacial water instead. Changkyun goes by with bags in tow, not saying a word to Kihyun, and does _he _think he has the right to give Kihyun the silent treatment? There’s a significant difference between silence and ignoring someone. So Kihyun, who can never leave well enough alone, follows him upstairs and waits in the doorway of the master closet, watching as Changkyun unfolds and sorts their purchases, critiquing his choice of clothing hangers. Where does Changkyun get his resilience? He’d seemed like he’d be so easy to break, but he just smiles at Kihyun’s sharp-tongued redirection and hangs the sweaters up on soft-shouldered frames instead of metal. 

“Thank you for taking me shopping,” he says, turning to look at him with a kind, soft smile.

“It’s not like you’ll really wear any of it,” Kihyun shrugs, ready to leave it at that and go, but— 

“You don’t wear everything in your closet,” Changkyun points out, gentle as always, and of course Kihyun takes that as the harshest criticism, immediately standing straighter, arms crossing. Changkyun must sense his displeasure, because he backtracks quickly: “But that doesn’t mean you don’t love it all, right?”

“What do I not wear, according to you?” Kihyun scoffs. “It’s not like I buy things just to fill the shelves. You’re the one that likes _clutter, _not me.”

“No— it’s not clutter,” Changkyun says. “All I mean is that we all have things we only wear on special occasions—”

“It’s a plain grey sweater,” Kihyun says. “You need an invite to the United Nations General Assembly to wear it?”

“I don’t mean the sweaters,” Changkyun sighs. Oh, good, he’s edging towards exasperation, this ought to be interesting. “You know, something like my twill coat, the one with the silver trim, or your Hermès scarves.”

Kihyun adores those scarves quite genuinely, and he’s offended by Changkyun daring to use them as ammunition. Yes, he hasn’t had occasion to wear even one, but he can’t just _agree _with Changkyun, let him win this, and so, fuming, he pushes past Changkyun into the closet and pulls open the drawer where he keeps the five orange boxes safe and sound, away from prying eyes, or so he’d thought. “These Hermès scarves?” he says, grabbing a box at random and pulling off the lid. God, being this angry all the time is beginning to wear on him, but Changkyun leaves him with absolutely no choice. “I hadn’t realized you were missing their absence.”

“They’re yours,” Changkyun says softly. “You can wear them or not wear them as much as you like—”

“Thank you for the authorization,” Kihyun huffs. “You think they’re going to waste, do you? Tell you what, if you like them so much, why don’t _you _wear them?” 

The one he’d taken is the one he loves the most, red and coral and white, vicious slashes of patterns running diagonally through the hand-printed silk, and he rolls it tight around his hand to draw it into one clean line, then loops it around the back of Changkyun’s neck. Changkyun pulls in a surprised breath, and the _worst _part of it is that it looks _so _good on him, instantly elevates him from a cripplingly shy, pretentious recluse to something cultured, very nearly dashing. Kihyun feels much like he did at Versace, stunned to see him look so good, because he’s never wanted mumbling and affected self-deprecation, he’s always wanted Jay fucking Gatsby, glitz and glamor and just enough romance to make his chest hurt when he finds the body floating in the pool, and Changkyun doesn’t even _know, _he’s not even doing it on purpose, and Kihyun can’t abide it, he just can’t. He meets the two corners of the scarf in front of Changkyun’s throat and pulls, uses it as a leash to yank him out of the closet so he can shove him down onto the chaise — good fucking thing they kept it around, they’ve gotten a surprising amount of mileage out of it — and straddle his lap. 

Changkyun goes. He sits and waits, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows, looking up at Kihyun so patiently, and Kihyun could kill him, he’s _meant _to kill him, and before he can overthink it, he ties the scarf around itself and pulls tight, tighter, until those intelligent eyes flare wide with an emotion Kihyun can’t identify and Changkyun’s mouth falls open on a gasp with no air. 

He’s hard already. Of course he is. He’s such a slut for getting pushed around. Kihyun slides a finger underneath the silk to keep it from getting too tight on Changkyun’s easily-bruised neck, leans down to kiss him, one thigh slipping between Changkyun’s. “You think because you buy me things,” he murmurs, “that I’ll do what you want me to do?”

“No,” Changkyun rasps. “No, you can do anything you— you want, you know that—”

“Stop giving me permission,” Kihyun hisses. Tugs the scarf tight until Changkyun is trembling, his legs twitching underneath Kihyun’s. “I _know _I can do anything. You have_ no _power over me, and it would do you well to remember as much.”

Changkyun can’t draw in enough breath to respond, so Kihyun loosens the scarf again and lets him suck in greedy lungfuls of oxygen, his hands running desperately up Kihyun’s thighs. “I’m sorry,” he pants. “I know you know— I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“No, you shouldn’t have,” Kihyun agrees, the incredible strength of his willpower keeping his voice from shaking with his ill-concealed rage, and this time he goes in with his hand, grabbing Changkyun’s neck and holding fast. Thumb on the left side, fingers on the right, squeezing to cut off bloodflow but not the air through his trachea — Kihyun read about this long ago, never thought he’d get lucky enough to try this with Changkyun, it was unthinkable and so he never let himself think it, but now he’s here, Changkyun is letting him, Changkyun wants it so badly, maybe as badly as Kihyun does, and Kihyun digs his fingertips into his flesh and holds until Changkyun’s cheeks are flushed a dark red and his eyelashes are fluttering. “But now you know, don’t you?”

Changkyun is unable to nod; Kihyun is holding his throat too tightly. Kihyun lets go, gives him the chance to break free completely if he needs it, if he wants it, but Changkyun only pulls him closer. “I do,” Changkyun manages weakly. Kihyun bites the slick cherry of his lower lip until he’s whining, but those words have always been Kihyun’s favorites to imagine in Changkyun’s voice, and sure, he heard them at their wedding, but they sound so different now, with Changkyun so different, too. “Kihyun— please, more, again—”

Kihyun doesn’t even know what, exactly, he’s asking for, but he’ll give him everything and more. His hand is itching to do something else, so he leaves the scarf to do his bidding in its place, ties it tight to get Changkyun all wheezy and nervous but not choking to death, and ruts their hips together. It feels like they have sex clothed far more often than not these days, but Kihyun doesn’t mind, _he’s _not the one footing the drycleaning bill. Already he feels much less angry than he did before, taking it out on Changkyun is always the best course of action, and Changkyun is so willing, so welcoming, he always makes it so easy. At Kihyun’s mercy completely. And mercy is something in which Kihyun is lacking, so in lieu of undoing Changkyun’s straining trousers to give him relief, he opens his own belt buckle instead and puts Changkyun’s fingers on his cock. He’s constantly thinking about how Changkyun’s pleasure is an afterthought, now’s a chance for him to practice what he preaches. And Changkyun takes it beautifully, moans with so much relief as though his cock is the one being stroked, it’s like he’s seconds away from crawling on his knees and sobbing his gratitude to his _master. _But Kihyun’s not as trite as that, and he prefers this, some semblance of equanimity, like they can both just get back up off this chaise and resume their days afterwards once they’re both done. Changkyun’s hand is nice, anyway, even nicer with Kihyun’s gorgeous scarf pulled taut around his aching throat, and Kihyun leans down to bite at his rabbit-fast pulse, jumping just above the edge of the silk. 

Changkyun moans, weak and soft, at the closeness. He’s so happy to stroke Kihyun off with no expectation of reciprocity, although at this point they both know Kihyun will probably cave and give it to him, and each new torment Kihyun sends his way he accepts with so much eager wide-eyed delight. Now Kihyun shoves his thigh up tighter between Changkyun’s legs, pushing against his trapped cock enough that it’s probably uncomfortable, but Changkyun thrives, each time Kihyun lets out a tight hiss of air in pleasure Changkyun echoes it tenfold, and Kihyun leans down again, bites at the side of the scarf to pull it tighter around Changkyun’s throat, and Changkyun’s dick pulses inside his slacks. The silk is wettened by Kihyun’s mouth, by his breathing, and some stupid part of him, something distant and prehistoric, nearly panics because _holy shit, that thing cost $800, I can’t afford a replacement, _but of course he can afford a replacement. He could afford thousands, hundreds of thousands, of replacements. Changkyun is stroking Kihyun exactly in that way that makes him come too fast, and some faint element of the panic-adjacent must remain, because then Kihyun rubs his mouth underneath Changkyun’s ear and says, “You love me.”

Neither question nor command; it’s a truism, a simple fact of the universe requiring no confirmation, but insisting on it nonetheless. Changkyun sees it as such, nods his desperation, blindly answers, “Yes.”

“You love me like this,” Kihyun insists.

“_Yes_,” Changkyun swears, even more fervently than the first time. 

It’s enough. His method really does get Kihyun to finish far too fast. Kihyun digs his teeth into the side of Changkyun’s throat, half-imagining he can taste the flesh underneath, and makes a mess of Changkyun’s hand and clothes, and once he’s done trembling out his release, he sits back on Changkyun’s thighs and looks over him with a cooler, more discerning gaze. There’s a dark spot of wetness where his cock is leaking through the fabric of his trousers, and Kihyun skims his fingertips over just that for a moment to make him shudder, then begins to untie the scarf from around his neck.

Hilariously, Changkyun whines in dismay, and Kihyun laughs at him, tweaking his ear to get him to shut up. “So mistrustful,” he reprimands. “Didn’t we agree I know what’s best?”

Changkyun now has the ability to nod, but visibly chooses not to, instead just looking up at Kihyun with gleaming eyes as Kihyun reties the scarf, this time in a smaller loop of just one end that leaves the majority of the fabric free — like a collar at the end of a thousand-dollar leash. If Changkyun had liked it before, his pretty husband’s pretty fingers keeping his respiration in a silk cage, he _loves _it now, his narrow lips quivering with unvoiced pleas for Kihyun to continue, and Kihyun, who hasn’t sucked him off in quite a while and thinks he might miss the feeling, slides down onto his knees, the end of the scarf wrapped tightly around his hand so he can yank and tighten the loop around Changkyun’s throat with a single gesture. 

“If you try to fuck my mouth,” he says, pushing Changkyun’s thighs apart, undoing his belt and fly, pulling his aching, dripping cock out, “I’ll tie your hands and feet to the bed with the _rest _of the Hermès scarves and leave you there until you’ve learned your lesson.”

“I understand,” Changkyun says, his voice as low as it can get. “I won’t try.”

Kihyun knows he won’t. Once given a direct order or a threat, Changkyun never disobeys. His submission is steadfast, naturally taken for granted, and Kihyun enjoys the totality with which Changkyun puts his life in Kihyun’s hands. He leans down to lave his tongue over the tip of Changkyun’s dick, tugs carefully on the scarf to give him added pressure, and in the past when he’s blown Changkyun, it’s felt about as typically degrading as that act inherently is, regardless of the utmost respect Changkyun has always, always shown him, but now, it’s totally different, the master on his knees for the pet. If Kihyun’s mouth weren’t otherwise occupied, he’d say so out loud, Changkyun loves shit like that. Kihyun rubs his lips against the side of Changkyun’s cock, still teasing, then takes him down, and though Changkyun’s thighs on either side of him quake with the effort, he doesn’t thrust up. 

Next month, then. Kihyun hasn’t forgotten why he’s here and what he’s going to do. It’s only fitting that Changkyun comprehends and really _feels _the depth of Kihyun’s hatred for him in the weeks before his death. That’s all he’s earned for his eighteen— now nineteen— months of romantic torment. Kihyun won’t let Changkyun come in his mouth, so he jacks him fast and sloppy with his hand, still wrapped up in the beautiful, beautiful Hermès scarf, then unties his neck and cleans up the rest of the come seeping into Changkyun’s shirt with the loose ends of the red silk. It’s unsalvageable, but somehow, Kihyun doesn’t mind. 

“Buy me a new one,” he says, and Changkyun can’t stop smiling, though he has no reason to ever smile again. If only he knew. Kihyun doesn’t kiss him; he thinks maybe he should stop doing that so much. It only confuses them both. There are a lot of things Kihyun should stop doing or should start doing, but he keeps getting sidetracked. That has to end. It’s going to end, just like everything else. Difficult to believe when they’re both like this, Kihyun lingering though he has no reason to, but nothing gold can stay, as the legend goes. Changkyun’s not gold, though. He’s shades of pink and white, black hair, dark eyes, like something out of a Byronic illustration, seconds away from catching tuberculosis and dying a tragic, untimely death easily preventable by good antibiotics. Maybe Kihyun is the impermanent gold after all. As has now become routine, he leaves Changkyun to clean himself up, and goes out for a drive alone.

_MONTH 20_

One of the worst moments of Kihyun’s life in recent memory is this: he gets home and Changkyun is gone.

Panic is a newly born emotion, not one Kihyun would like to nurture. He’ll cull it here before it peels open its womb-wet eyes and rears its deformed head to fill the air with its sickening alien mewls. Changkyun’s car isn’t in the garage, and Kihyun tries to think logically; there are only so many places he could be. Wasting no time, he calls him, and Changkyun doesn’t answer. So Kihyun opens up his second most recently used app, fucking Find Friends, and there’s Wonho at home in New Paltz, there’s Minhyuk still at school, but the app always takes so long to load Changkyun, like a glitch in the software targeted specifically at Kihyun’s peace of mind. 

“Fuck,” Kihyun mutters, but instead of throwing his phone into the wall or garbage disposal, he closes the app and calls Changkyun again. While it rings, he catches himself pacing, and forces himself to stop in the middle of the living room, his hand gripping hard enough at the back of one of the armchairs to make his knuckles ache. The phone rings once, twice, and at three there is a click, and—

“Hey,” Changkyun says, sounding just a little out of breath. “Sorry I missed your first call, I was— you okay?”

“Where the _fuck_ are you,” Kihyun demands. 

“What? Oh, sorry— I’m at the gym.”

What the fuck. Kihyun frowns, furious both at Changkyun for making Kihyun worry himself half to death while Changkyun was _at the gym _and at himself for worrying over such an idiot in the first place. “The gym,” he repeats flatly.

“Yeah,” Changkyun says, and the line buzzes with the sound of Changkyun requesting a video call; Kihyun, teeth gritted, accepts, and sure enough, Changkyun is warm-faced and mildly disheveled and in the weight room at what is visibly a perfectly normal upper-class private gym. “I didn’t know when you’d be home today, so—”

“Get back here,” Kihyun snaps and hangs up on him, one of his very, very favorite things to do, but he can’t even savor it right now. The gym? Since fucking when has Changkyun gone to the gym? Oh, Kihyun can see it clearly, Changkyun’s motivations for going. He has misinterpreted Kihyun’s recent apathy as pure aesthetic dissatisfaction, and he’s trying to get himself fit and toned so Kihyun will love him again. It’s not like he’d had an eight-pack when they’d met in the first place, though, so his logic is flawed. Up until now, he’s seemed to stay relatively healthy through sheer wishful thinking. How typically backwards of him to attribute Kihyun’s obvious hatred to something as shallow as his physique. He’s fine the way he is, for Kihyun’s needs. Ridiculous. But then — but then Kihyun starts thinking, and when he’s alone it’s so easy for his thoughts to chase each other into hysteria, and maybe Changkyun’s not working out for vanity’s sake but for the sake of physical strength, so he could resist or fight back if there were to be an altercation. Sure, if Kihyun pushes him off a cliff but Changkyun has enough muscle to be able to hold onto a stray outcrop of stone, that would make Kihyun’s life very difficult indeed. Fuck. But of course that’s not it, Changkyun doesn’t have a single machinating bone in his body, but just the possibility is enough to incense Kihyun even further. How dare he try to resist the inevitability of his fate? How dare he make Kihyun worry? 

Kihyun had been planning on putting the murder off another month — his birthday is in a couple of weeks, he’s curious to see what Changkyun has prepared — but Changkyun’s foolishness is forcing him to reconsider. He’s been able to control himself less and less around Changkyun lately, and while he wouldn’t describe himself as _unhinged, _the hinges are certainly beginning to come loose. He tracks Changkyun’s location again and finds the blue dot moving, on its way back home, and although Kihyun would like nothing better than to throw him in the dungeon in pitch-darkness to think about his sins for a while, their basement has a fully-stocked wet bar and an air hockey table, and is therefore hardly conducive to the medieval torture methods Changkyun deserves. The old saying that ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ has never been more apt; Kihyun has never hated someone more than he hates Changkyun, and, certainly, he has never been more familiar with anyone, either. As he waits for Changkyun to get home, he tries to think of an appropriate punishment, some way to beat into Changkyun’s thick skull that he _can’t _just leave without telling Kihyun where he’s going and when he’ll be back, but he can think of nothing that doesn’t result in Changkyun being stabbed to death, which would certainly complicate Kihyun’s next 20 to 25 years somewhat. His old standby is simply ignoring him, just as effective of a way to hurt him as anything else, so he goes upstairs, into their room, and locks the door from the inside. 

It’s childish, maybe, to hide and pout and tantrum by himself, but Kihyun prefers to save his pride for things that matter, as opposed to wasting it on Changkyun, who is as insignificant as insignificant gets. He’s glaring into _The Moonstone _by Wilkie Collins on his Kindle by the time he hears the rumble of the garage door, Changkyun’s car pulling into its place, and he’s been on the same paragraph for the last ten minutes but it doesn’t matter, he’d rather do this than have to look at Changkyun’s face while Changkyun profusely apologizes to him. Sure enough, here he comes, calling Kihyun’s name from downstairs, searching for him. Kihyun narrows his eyes at the small letters on the screen, staying silent. Changkyun’s footsteps on the stairs, then his voice, closer— “Kihyun? Are you here?”

“Oh, good, you’re back,” Kihyun says, unable to resist. “I was about to file a missing persons report.”

“I didn’t know you’d be home so early,” Changkyun’s voice says, muffled on the other side of the door. He tries the handle, then sighs. “Kihyun— can I come in?”

“No,” Kihyun says. “You clearly can’t. It’s locked.”

A brief pause, then Changkyun says, “_May _I?” with a smile audible in his voice.

“Also no,” Kihyun snaps, roughly pressing the button to shut off the Kindle and missing at first, but succeeding on the second try. “I can’t believe you did that.”

“I’m sorry,” Changkyun says. He’s using that palliative tone that makes him sound so condescending, and Kihyun hates it, hates all of this, hates him so fiercely it makes his body ache for something undefined. “For future reference, I have sessions scheduled for Tuesdays and Thursdays at this time, 80 minutes, and the gym is fifteen minutes’ drive away. I added it to my Google Calendar, in case you want to check. My trainer’s name is Max Myles—” 

“That’s a _painfully _stupid name,” Kihyun mutters to himself, already searching him online to find any information on whether he’s straight or not, any threat or not; the website loads in seconds, one of the many perks of paying exorbitant amounts for fiber-optic WiFi, and thankfully, the header of the very first page is a photo of Max with his wife and children. How very _normal. _

“—which is a very dumb name, but he’s really good at what he does,” Changkyun says. “I’m sorry for not warning you, Kihyun. It was just a first session, just to see if he’d be a good fit. And he is, so I’ll be going back on those days. No more surprises. I’m sorry for worrying you.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Kihyun says. 

There is another silence. Kihyun can picture Changkyun well; he’s doubtless still got a hand on the doorknob, waiting for Kihyun to unlock it, and he’s certainly got that extra-worried look in his always-troubled eyes, brows pulled together in a frown, lips drawn. Kihyun lets them both wait it out, and Changkyun says, “I’m sorry again. I’ll be downstairs, okay? I’m not going anywhere.”

Kihyun huffs but otherwise doesn’t respond. Maybe he should start being sweeter to Changkyun again — he needs incentive to stay. If he leaves, it’s all lost. But he hasn’t seemed dissatisfied as of late. His face has a healthy glow, he’s content to sleep by Kihyun’s side and not touch him except for on Kihyun’s terms, he has stopped asking what Kihyun does all day, where he goes, what he gets up to. But the cold, paralyzing fear that sank into Kihyun’s body like neurotoxic snakebite venom at coming home to an empty house has very few antidotes, and Changkyun holds the keys to the medicine cabinet. 

His friends won’t be coming to the city to celebrate his 29th. He’d told them not to, but to Changkyun, he’d lied and said they all couldn’t make it. Changkyun had actually bought it and been very sad on Kihyun’s behalf — idiot. But frankly, Kihyun just couldn’t be bothered with the organization, with Minhyuk doubtless attempting to invite himself over to Bronxville to see the place, though it’s Kihyun’s fortress of solitude and he can scarcely stand to have Changkyun, the other name on the contract, here most days, with Wonho’s well-intentioned but excruciating prying about the state of the newlyweds’ existence, and with Hyungwon’s cold, silent, but undeniable _judgment. _Kihyun never will forgive him for what he said at the bachelor party, will he? It’s better this way. They’ll all call him on the day of and leave him well enough alone otherwise, just like he wants. 

Changkyun and Lena seem to be planning some kind of fancy dinner. Kihyun wishes they’d just fuck off. And he does have a very simple way to get Changkyun to fuck off, but every time he’s about to start enacting some plan or other, he gets… distracted. Changkyun is mouthy, he loves doing crazy things with his tongue. If last year, he’d expressed his worry for Kihyun, his perception of him as being unhappy about turning a year older, via childish doting and fun-filled activities, this year he expresses it through extravagant sexual favors and staring at Kihyun when he thinks Kihyun isn’t paying attention. That’s what will ultimately be his downfall: assuming that Kihyun is never not paying attention when that’s what he’s always, always, doing. Looking for weak spots, though he knows where all of them are. It’s like Kihyun is waiting, biding his time, but he _did _that already. He’s not sure what the fuck he’s waiting for anymore.

Because Changkyun’s transformation, of sorts, after their homecoming, was a surprise, but Changkyun is out of surprises. So he likes being pushed around a little, so he likes being on his knees, so he likes being helpless. Kihyun could have guessed all of that after the very first time they met. It’s not _that _surprising, and Kihyun frankly doesn’t care enough to find out how deep Changkyun’s submissive-masochistic streak goes. He’d do anything for Kihyun, yes. At this point, he might even kill himself if Kihyun asked in the right tone of voice. God, he’s so pathetic, so boring. After his birthday, that’s when Kihyun will do it. Just like as if Changkyun had been a toy he’d gotten as a gift. He’s played with him, now it’s time to throw him away. 

Changkyun keeps up most days, but sometimes he acts guilty. The past months have been wearing on him, in his own way. He comes to Kihyun one evening as November begins to wind its way down, and, face clean and young and vulnerable, quietly offers, “Do you want me to sleep in the guest room?”

Not even on the couch. He can’t even _conceive _of sleeping on a couch when they have five fully-furnished guest rooms just gathering dust. Kihyun hadn’t even been all that cruel to him today — he’d just laughed when Changkyun had asked if he wanted to go to a show in the city this weekend, and he’d ignored him when Changkyun had said he was going out to train but he’d be back in two hours, do we need anything from the grocery store? Finally, when Changkyun had gotten back and come up to let him know, he’d just snapped at him to fuck off, so okay, maybe he was a _little_ harsh, but there’s no need to break into histrionics. 

Kihyun’s lip curls in disgust and he tosses his magazine aside. “No,” he says and yanks him down to the bed. If he sleeps somewhere else, Kihyun can’t keep an eye on him — he could leave again, he could run away completely. He’s no good to Kihyun if he’s not here. Kihyun curls all his limbs around him tightly, and of course they end up fucking, Kihyun on his back with his legs splayed wide while Changkyun, upright, fucks him deep and fast and hard, his skin glowing with exertion but his pace not flagging. Then Kihyun realizes — Changkyun hasn’t been working out for attention, he’s been working out so he can fuck Kihyun better, but he already— already fucks him so good, and—

Yes, Kihyun has been distracted. It’s not his fault. He affects complexity, but really he’s a simple revenge-motivated creature, and Changkyun is a most fetching target. Never mind the actual murder — what could be better, what could be sweeter, than pulling his hand away when Changkyun reaches for it, than just staring blankly at him in response to a compliment, than pushing him away when he tries to get amorous in bed? Kihyun’s restlessness from those first couple of weeks stateside is coming back, and he doesn’t know how to stave it off this time. Once again he considers having an affair, but it’s not about the sex. The sex is actually fine, he actually has no complaints, for once. It’s something else. He attributes it to the constant presence of Changkyun in a small space, getting stir-crazy, and starts to plan a trip. Maybe he can push Changkyun into the _Canal Grando _of Venice, wouldn’t that be romantic. Changkyun catches him looking at exclusive travel destinations in Italy, and his smile is so hopeful and tender and knowing that Kihyun wants to throw him down on the ground and rub his face into the carpet, because the crime of making an assumption about Kihyun bears the heaviest sentence. Sometimes he wishes Changkyun would just forget who he is and they could start all over again, but he doesn’t know where those thoughts come from, so he just ignores them until they go away.

Kihyun’s birthday, inevitably, arrives. From the moment his eyes crack open, it’s clear Changkyun is going to work hard to make this a special day. Misguided, but if he pulls it off correctly, it’ll be appreciated. The first obvious difference is that he isn’t in bed, and Kihyun can hear him downstairs in the kitchen. He must have gotten up an hour ago, so quietly and softly Kihyun wasn’t awoken by it, getting started on the festivities early. Kihyun puts on his slippers and his robe, then goes to join him, following the sounds of cooking and Vivaldi. Not _The Four Seasons, _thank God, but a concerto for four violins. Changkyun must have finally gotten out the record player, because Kihyun recognizes this piece from an LP he’d bought at a music department sale back in college, but until now, his extremely modest collection of vinyls has been forgotten in the garage, mixed in with Changkyun’s far more impressive selection, his first-press Culture Club records and Beatles singles with manufacturing errors on the packaging making them priceless. It’s always nice to come down the stairs to the sound of harpsichords, it makes Kihyun feel suitably regal. How does Changkyun know so accurately what he wants? How does he always know, except for when he doesn’t? Call it intuition, dumb beginner’s luck, a fluke, but the end result is the same; he’s earned himself another day. He has Kihyun’s coffee ready on the end of the kitchen island, he’s wearing his glasses and an inoffensive grey cardigan that makes him look very mousy, and when he hears Kihyun coming in, he turns and gives him an end-of-the-aisle, waiting-by-the-altar smile. “Good morning! Happy birthday!”

_I don’t know what’s happening to me, _Kihyun wants to say. _I don’t know what I’m becoming. _Instead, he picks up the coffee, sighs wearily, and says, “You’d better not have gotten me any presents.”

“Of course not,” Changkyun says, earnest as ever. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes, but I don’t trust your cooking, and I won’t eat leftovers,” Kihyun reminds. It goes without saying that he’s not in the mood to get dressed up and go somewhere, and he most certainly doesn’t want a near-stranger in his home on his birthday, so Lena’s not welcome to prepare their meals today. An interesting dilemma, to be sure, and he’s sure Changkyun has an equally interesting solution for Kihyun to immediately reject. 

“I know, which is why,” Changkyun says, stepping away from the stove and gesturing to the various small containers spread around it, “I had Lena help me out in advance. She pre-portioned everything, mixed what needed mixing, chopped what needed chopping, et cetera, and all I have to do is… just cook it, I guess.”

Impressive. He’s managed to fit himself through several tight loopholes without tripping any of Kihyun’s wires. “Sounds like a tall order,” he says with a lift of his eyebrows. “I mean, will you even turn the stove off when you’re done?”

Changkyun misinterprets that as flirtation and blushes pink, ducking his head and smiling. “Yes, I will,” he says. “Do you— do you want to hear my plans for the rest of the day?”

“Your plans,” Kihyun repeats, and Changkyun hurries to correct himself, only going more and more pink as time passes.

“Well— some ideas I had, that you don’t have to do, obviously, but just things I thought you might like,” he explains. Have his shoulders always been so broad? Or is that the gym’s fault? He should stop going. Kihyun has been frowning distractedly at the shape of his arms, but Changkyun was waiting for permission to continue, which Kihyun belatedly gives with an uninterested nod. “So breakfast to start, and then I reserved the rare books room at The Strand for a couple of hours if you’d like to go— they have a first-edition of _Ulysses _signed by James Joyce and Matisse, of all people—”

“He did the illustrations,” Kihyun says, bored. 

“Yes,” Changkyun says, thrown off his rhythm but quickly finding it again. “And I’ve put that on hold, if you’d like to have it. Then tea in this, this beautiful greenhouse— oh, fuck, shit, I meant to say something about that earlier.”

Kihyun just looks at him, not unamused, and Changkyun sighs, covers his face with his hands for a moment, then leaves the kitchen. “It’s not a present,” he calls behind himself. “Well, it kind of is, but not for your birthday.”

In the meantime, Kihyun gets up to go see what ingredients Lena has prepared for his birthday breakfast. It seems to be a kind of modified eggs Benedict, because Kihyun hates both spinach and English muffins, and Changkyun had his favorite sourdough flown in, along with visibly farm-fresh eggs — Kihyun touches one, and is relieved that it’s not so fresh that it’s still warm — and an assortment of light fall vegetables as accompaniment. There are also ingredients for something sweet, maybe muffins? If Lena thinks Changkyun is capable of poaching an egg, she’s going to be very sorely disappointed, but Kihyun isn’t getting his hopes up. He knows about that copy of _Ulysses, _though. It costs no less than $45,000, if he’s not mistaken. And it’s on hold, waiting for him to come and get it any time. Kihyun eats a blueberry from the small straw box; despite it being November, well past blueberry season, it’s not even sour. Before he can eat another, though, Changkyun comes back with a folder in his hand, still pink-cheeked, and ushers Kihyun away from the stove. 

“So, um,” he says, setting the folder down carefully on the counter for Kihyun to examine, “there’s this really incredible abandoned building on 60th, right by the Queensboro Bridge, and it was going to get torn down for… I think a new facility for some city college? But I just, after I saw the rooftop greenhouse I couldn’t _not _get it, and I’ve been having it refurbished and restored for the past few months, plants brought in and stuff, and it’s finally ready. And it’s yours.”

Sure enough, the deed in the folder has Kihyun’s name on the line. Changkyun got him a _building _for his birthday. “I didn’t want any presents,” he says slowly, skimming over the details of the property. The greenhouse alone purports to be 5,000 square feet, holy mother of God. “When did you do all this?”

“It was supposed to be for Christmas, but they got it done early,” Changkyun says, chewing the edge of his thumb nervously— a bum habit he’s picked up recently that Kihyun has been meaning to break him out of before he causes any permanent damage to his skin. “I bought it, I dunno, like… six months ago? Seven?”

So before their wedding. Right around their first anniversary, if it’s closer to seven than six. And even through all this, through Kihyun’s awful, awful behavior upon their return, Changkyun had maintained this project, keeping it a secret so it would be a better surprise. Because he still thinks Kihyun loves surprises. Well, maybe if all of them were like this, he would, but that’s not the point. “Oh,” he says. “Alright. Yes, I’d like to see it.”

The tension in Changkyun’s shoulders dissipates instantaneously, and he’s all smiles again, lit up as though _he’s _the one getting extravagant presents today. “It’s so beautiful, I just toured it last week,” he says. “I’m so sorry for not telling you, but in case it didn’t turn out well, I didn’t want to—”

“It’s fine,” Kihyun says, flipping through the rest of the paperwork in the hopes of seeing a pricetag, just out of curiosity. “Good part of town, too.”

“Exactly,” Changkyun nods. “And the rest of the building— well, you can decide what to do with it.”

Oh, right, Kihyun owns the whole building. A very small shiver goes through him, but he ignores it, goes over to sit down on one of the barstools with his coffee. “I’ll give it some thought,” he says. “Are you going to cook, or what?”

“Right,” Changkyun remembers, pink and happy, and turns away to the stove. Kihyun watches him as he pushes his glasses down his nose to read Lena’s instructions over the tops of the frames, but he’s visibly distracted, and in a couple more minutes, the cause becomes clear: in the process of heating the water for the eggs, he says in a deceptively casual tone, “And— if you want some space today, of course you can do everything by yourself, I can send you all the directions and contacts, but the relevant people at the relevant places are expecting you, so—”

Kihyun rolls his eyes. “You can come with me,” he says.

“Okay,” Changkyun agrees immediately. He turns back and flashes Kihyun a smile, so soft and hesitant and sweet that it’s pathetic. “Thank you.”

Kihyun won’t further injure his dignity by acknowledging that. Changkyun has enough to worry about right now — the stand mixer is currently starting to spit up flour, unhappy with Changkyun’s maladroit attempts to make the muffins. Kihyun can’t get a second of peace around him, that much is very clear. He sets his mostly-finished coffee down and gets up to come take over, and even though Changkyun murmurs protests, he doesn’t really stop him, knowing he’s out of his depth. They finish making Kihyun’s birthday breakfast together, and the eggs turn out just fine. 

“And we can take the muffins with us to eat on the way to the city,” Changkyun suggests, his happiness about all this relatively convivial kitchenry making him complacent, and Kihyun fixes him with a frown.

“And get crumbs in my car? No, I don’t think so.”

“Oh,” Changkyun says. It’s clear the idea hadn’t even occurred to him. He’s the kind of rich that never notices when something is dirty, because it’ll be cleaned by invisible hands within 24 hours. He doesn’t care about anything he owns, Kihyun has noticed, none of his possessions matter to him, that’s why his apartment was always so cluttered, why his clothes are worn threadbare, he just doesn’t _notice. _It’s infuriating. Kihyun is always having to pick up after him; he’s so useless, he could never survive in the wild. “Right, yeah. Okay, never mind.”

Why is he so sad about these fucking muffins? Kihyun walks by him to get to the stairs so he can go get dressed, skims his hand along the small of Changkyun’s back as he goes. “We’ll eat them later. Muffins are always better after they’ve thoroughly cooled, _then _been re-heated.”

Changkyun clearly does not have particularly strong opinions about muffins, which is surprising given the other random issues he has strong opinions about, or possibly he’s just stunned by the light, casual, nonthreatening contact for a change. Kihyun leaves him there, frozen, and goes up to dress while considering how he feels about inching another year towards 30. He comes to the conclusion that he’d prefer not to think about it, puts on his new sweater from Versace, brushes his hair, does the faintest hint of various other grooming procedures, eyebrows cheeks lips, and finally declares himself perfect after about twenty minutes. Changkyun hasn’t come up; is he planning on taking Kihyun to Manhattan dressed like _that? _Kihyun picks out clothes for him as well, just to preempt any kind of grapple over Changkyun’s cardigan — he’s been bolder lately with talking back — and returns to the ground floor. 

“Go change,” he says, breezing through the kitchen, where Changkyun is sampling the muffins. “Clothes are on the bed.”

To his surprise — or possibly on purpose, because it’s Kihyun’s birthday and Changkyun is trying to be on his best behavior — Changkyun doesn’t protest or attempt to defend his choice of outerwear, just sets down the half-eaten muffin and goes up. He returns in record time, glasses unfortunately replaced by contact lenses, and gestures to the selection of car keys by the garage door. “Which chariot, my liege?”

Kihyun nearly spits mediocre muffin in his face. “Porsche,” he says, “and less talking.”

“Right, sorry,” Changkyun says with his dimply smile, not sounding sorry in the slightest, and opens every door for Kihyun.

In the rare books room of The Strand, which Kihyun has been hearing about for years but never dared to dream of seeing though it’s usually open to the public, Changkyun is practically vibrating out of his skin with curiosity and interest. Kihyun had taken three looks at the copy of _Ulysses _and declared it a nice piece, but what’s the point in getting it, they haven’t even unpacked the rest of the books they already have. But while he steps forward to see some mid-century British poetry, he hears Changkyun murmur to one of the employees that he’ll take it anyway, for himself if not for his husband. Otherwise, though, Changkyun is staying still, waiting in one place, and Kihyun looks up from a beautifully illuminated, fragile copy of _The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_ to see him there, looking for all the world like Oliver Twist too scared to ask for another bowlful of gruel.

“Do you want to look around, too?” Kihyun guesses, barely holding back a mocking smile. “You may. You really need my permission to do everything?”

“Yes,” Changkyun shrugs. He heads straight for the e. e. cummings, looking grateful but still reserved, since— “It’s your birthday, after all.”

“God, don’t remind me,” Kihyun mutters.

Changkyun goes still and apologetic immediately, which is possibly even worse than if he’d done nothing at all. “Sorry,” he starts, soft. “I’ll stop making such a big deal—”

“Jesus, Changkyun, it’s _fine, _just stop,” Kihyun says. Changkyun stops just as immediately as he’d begun, and Kihyun pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. “Just— relax. It’s fine. This is… nice.”

“It is?” Changkyun says, lighting up so brightly Kihyun can scarcely look at him. Kihyun won’t give him the validation of confirming it again, and he doesn’t like that expression Changkyun is taking on, so he glances detachedly around the room and purses his lips to indicate he’s done here for the moment. So what if it’s nice? Changkyun is still clearly very confused about who and what Kihyun really is, and they’d better get out of here before he starts connecting any more dots. _Ulysses _will be delivered by personal courier to Bronxville by week’s end, and in the meantime, Changkyun and Kihyun depart for Kihyun’s building. Kihyun’s building. That has such a beautiful ring to it, _my building, _Kihyun thinks as they take the newly-replaced elevator up to the top. The angle had been wrong to see the greenhouse from the street, but he can be patient for this; he suspects it’ll be worth it, though he’s loath to admit that directly to Changkyun. 

The doors open into a verdant, slightly steamy paradise. Plants of all shapes and sizes decorate the floor, the walls, the steel bars that make up the ceiling, trees and flowers and bushes and vines, some even filtering the sunlight so it’s not quite as blinding underneath all the glass. It’s nearly impossible to believe that it’s the end of November — the scent, the atmosphere, is absolutely tropical, and Kihyun has trouble controlling his expression to conceal the unadulterated wonder that he feels. And Changkyun did all this for him? Kihyun hadn’t even been sure that he’d like something like this, and yet here he is, utterly enchanted. 

He begins to walk in, Changkyun following a couple of paces behind, and stretches out his hand to touch as he passes by, his fingertips skimming over the petals of an aster, the tendrils of a devil’s ivy, the stalk of an incongruous sunflower. Changkyun must have raided the Bronxville library’s section on the language of flowers. Widow’s-thrill, eternal love and persistence. Hydrangea; not only hideously ugly, but also symbolic of emotion and understanding, a significance as repellent as the flower itself. They walk further and further into the greenhouse, and finally come upon what must be the beating heart of Changkyun’s whole creation: a small sitting area, two chairs and a chaise, with a table already set with tea for them to enjoy. The chairs themselves are like Titania’s bower, completely enveloped in blooms of every shape and color, every possible meaning. Peonies for compassion and good relationships, astilbe for patience and dedication, cornflowers for young men in love, heather for good luck, iris for trust, and a few whose meanings Kihyun isn’t sure of — stock, lisianthus, protea. He wants to say something about how it’s a good thing he’s not allergic to pollen, but he can’t bring himself to be cruel, not right now, not in front of this. 

Kihyun chooses the chaise, smooths his hand over the silk by his side to invite Changkyun to join him. It’s warm in here, a flushed glow already high on Changkyun’s cheeks, and it’s not lost on Kihyun that a year ago, on his birthday, too, he had some of the best sex of his life, and that was before all their recent thrilling, delicious developments. Maybe he’s reminded of that because Changkyun has just unbuttoned the top two pearls of his shirt, and he only smiles, dimpled and bashful, at Kihyun’s displeased look. “It’s warm in here,” he justifies quietly.

Not to be outdone, Kihyun fully just pulls his own sweater off, and reaches to undo the rest of Changkyun’s buttons. Why pretend they’re here for anything else but this? There’s probably nothing in that teapot. The shirt Kihyun had picked slips easily down Changkyun’s arms, leaving him pleasantly on display, and Kihyun eyes the cleaner lines of his stomach and chest and thinks that even though he liked him fine before, this is quite nice, too. “You said you’ve been working on this for over half a year?” he asks, tone still neutral even as he gets Changkyun undressed, and Changkyun has learned enough not to question or acknowledge Kihyun’s more inexplicable actions by now, just staying in one place and letting Kihyun touch him. “Why?”

“So you could have a space of your own when you came to the city,” Changkyun explains. “The Plaza and the Ritz are great, but this is just yours. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you the numbers of the people to call to change it up, or I can call, naturally.”

Naturally. Kihyun likes that Changkyun no longer says anything to the effect of ‘you can do this’ or ‘you can do that.’ He finishes undoing his shirt and rubs his palm down the flat plane of Changkyun’s abdomen, rests his loosely curled fingers just above the waist of his pants, heavy with promise but not with touch, not yet. “I thought I made myself very clear,” he says. “No presents. This counts as a present.”

“But it wasn’t supposed to be for your birthday,” Changkyun points out. No, nothing Kihyun attempts to do to him today will stick. He’s too happy, too buoyant at spending another birthday with Kihyun, no cloud would be dark enough to reject his silver lining. “Does it count as a present for a specific day if you’re only _told _about it on the day?”

“The point is moot,” Kihyun says, and smoothly swings a leg over Changkyun’s body so he’s straddling his hips, “because you did give it to me today, regardless of when you intended for me to receive it.”

Changkyun, the absolute bastard, just shrugs, his eyes sparkling with the glint of greenery-diffused sunlight and the reflection of the glass roof, and Kihyun tugs his head back by the hair to angle him up for a kiss. All in all, Kihyun is having a rather fine time, but acknowledging that much even in his head is clearly a death sentence, because Changkyun immediately ruins everything completely with just a few short words: “I’m so sorry your friends couldn’t come.”

Kihyun stops kissing him and pulls back to fix him with a critical look. “I’m not.”

“Oh,” Changkyun says. He’s visibly struggling to understand why: because Kihyun wants Changkyun all to himself? Because Kihyun wants solitude above all else? Because he never liked his friends very much, really? Wrong on all counts, except perhaps the second. And now Kihyun’s sense of contentment is vanishing fast, the fragile crystal house of cards he’s built for himself beginning to crumble because Changkyun is blowing it down, and he starts to pull out of Changkyun’s lap, mood soured, but Changkyun grips him by the waist before he can get too far, looking up at him plaintively. “Wait— I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought that up. I’m glad we can spend today how _you _want to do it. You can see them anytime, but this day only happens once a year, right?”

Hm. In the time they’ve spent together, he’s gotten pretty good at bullshitting the kind of way Kihyun likes. That was more or less the correct answer, so Kihyun remains in his arms. Besides, the _gesture _of this present-that’s-not-a-present, Kihyun’s own space, a viridescent sanctuary in the concrete jungle of Manhattan, is also on the right track. He doesn’t like how close Changkyun is getting to the truth of him, but he can’t deny the benefits. It’s strange to be on top of Changkyun, foreplay-adjacent, and not be so angry that he’s seeing red, and Kihyun would prefer not to get too used to it, so he gets busy to speed this moment along, leaning back in with his fingers sweetly on either side of Changkyun’s jaw to kiss him again. Kihyun keeps feeling an uneasy prickle on the back of his neck, the same one he gets when they kiss too much in public, because they really are so exposed, nothing above them but the sky, and were anyone in a taller building to either side of them look down, they’d see two men in a primal garden, pressed together and stripping bare, like at the start of humanity, surrounded by flora and giving into temptation, the first two people ever to be in love. 

The air around them is hot, but Changkyun’s mouth is hotter, his lips so easily bitten, his tongue so easily sucked on. Kihyun pushes in as close to him as he can so he can feel his heart beating, and it’s strong and present and alive, or maybe that’s Kihyun’s own, the two are getting confused, what with the rush of his pulse in his ears and the throb of Changkyun’s blood through his body. He’s very nearly comfortable, but even that in and of itself is enough to discomfit him. Pleasure, uncomplicated, is not something Kihyun knows how to enjoy. And everything is always so complicated with Changkyun. They can fuck just like this, and it’s rapidly heading in that direction, Changkyun keeping Kihyun arched against him with an arm around the small of his back as he pushes out of his own trousers but fumbles, first, to take a small pouch of lube from the pocket, one of those little sample packs that are given out like candy at collegiate student health clinics. Kihyun huffs a laugh at him, in response to which Changkyun just smiles, and then they’re naked, Changkyun leaning in for another adoring kiss, and Kihyun keeps his eyes open so he can watch the look on his face when Kihyun runs his hands over his body. It feels exciting, it feels very nearly _wrong _to be about to fuck right here, right now, but he’s past the point of being able to stop, he’s already gotten Changkyun hard and ready, and that’s not going to go to waste. 

“I don’t even like flowers that much,” Kihyun informs him, breathless, as Changkyun slicks up his cock and rubs it against the edge of Kihyun’s hole, Kihyun’s legs spread so wide across Changkyun’s lap. “Especially— especially roses.”

“Do you see any roses here?” Changkyun asks, and his voice is so low, and he must be remembering the morning after their first date, that massive bouquet he’d had delivered to Kihyun’s office. His cock starts to push inside Kihyun, and Kihyun goes a little glassy-eyed and mindless for just a moment, rocking back to take it deeper, past the tip, the motion of which makes Changkyun groan, too. Kihyun braces one hand on Changkyun’s shoulder, nails unafraid to dig in, and one on the back of the chaise for leverage, and slowly begins to fuck himself on Changkyun’s dick, his head falling back for just a moment from the ache, the drag of his cock inside him, and of course Changkyun leans in to kiss along the column of his throat, the way he breathes just as lush as the artificial forest sprung up around them.

From here on out, Kihyun knows they’ll do anything but speak. Before, Changkyun loved deep heart-to-hearts, but now he takes what he’s given and leaves it at that. What they _do _is communication enough, the way Kihyun guides Changkyun’s head to the junction between his neck and his shoulder to encourage him to leave a lovebite, the darkness of which is commensurate to the amount of love Changkyun feels, how Changkyun’s hands shake, even after all this time, when Kihyun begins to grind on his dick in earnest. Is this it? Are they just going to have languid vanilla sex in this improbable green paradise? Kihyun can’t even think how long it’s been since they did something like this, peaceful, lazy, hardly any urgency or passion. It would be rote if it weren’t for their surroundings, but Changkyun doesn’t seem to be similarly detached, as earnest and committed as he always is to everything he does as he guides Kihyun’s hips up and down, touches him and lavishes with tenderness. This is the man whose cock drools when Kihyun chokes him, who whimpers in incoherent gratitude when Kihyun lets him suckle on the tips of his fingers while he comes? Kihyun wasn’t sure that they would ever have this kind of sex again, and in truth, he was glad for the absence. Having Changkyun touch him with so much sweet forgiveness has become foreign, and Kihyun is overheating, verging on uncomfortable, and he squirms on his next down-thrust, panting against the side of Changkyun’s head. “It’s hot,” he complains.

“It is a greenhouse,” Changkyun points out.

Fuck— he feels it, too. Kihyun leaps at the chance. If Changkyun is responding to a complaint not with apology but with explanation, that means he must want to provoke a different kind of response, and Kihyun turns his head, nuzzling into him, to bite the top of his ear. It’s not that he needs to cause Changkyun pain to get off, and it’s not that that’s his only source of connection to his fraudulent husband, but he wants it, desire is sharp and bitter in his mouth, and he starts to ride on Changkyun’s cock faster, chasing the sensation. “You couldn’t have picked less tropical plants? I feel like they’re making it worse,” he says, tone remarkably even while he bounces, and Changkyun’s face is all aglow when he pulls back to see him, eyes burning with that now-familiar heat. That’s probably not how botany works, but does it matter? Does the truth ever matter with them? It’s all a step along the journey, all part of the game, and Kihyun is determined to win regardless of the cost. 

“Yes, well,” Changkyun says, a grin starting in the immodest corner of his upper lip, “I tried to get a couple plum trees, but everyone told me they wouldn’t survive in a hothouse environment.”

_Fuck. _There it is: Kihyun sees red. How dare he? For as long as Kihyun’s mind runs back, he can’t recall a single instance of Changkyun even teasing him, let alone making fun of him, but what the fuck is that if not an obvious dig? He slams his hips down, hates the smug, smirky look on Changkyun’s lips, and snaps, “God— sometimes you make me want to hit you.”

Changkyun’s eyes flare wide. “Then do it,” he says urgently.

Kihyun doesn’t think twice. He raises his hand and slaps him, open-palmed, fresh across his face. Hard enough to knock Changkyun’s head to the side and that smug mouth open on a shocked breath, and his eyes squeeze closed and his chest heaves with his shuddered gasps. _Oh God, _Kihyun thinks suddenly, _what have I done? _He hit him— he _hurt _him, he really hurt him, and Kihyun starts shaking, the palm of his hand stings from the contact and Changkyun’s face must be in even more pain, and Kihyun presses his trembling fingers to the spot he’d hit on Changkyun’s cheek — it’s hot to the touch. Changkyun’s not saying anything, and Kihyun’s hips have gone still, what the fuck has he done? Involuntary knee-jerk response, his eyes are prickling, his throat is thick, why isn’t Changkyun saying anything? “Changkyun,” Kihyun says and it sounds like a plea, hoarse and unsteady. 

The seconds that it takes to wait for Changkyun’s response are excruciating. Kihyun strokes a faltering thumb over his cheekbone, pink blooming bright underneath, and finally, _finally _Changkyun moves, Kihyun feels the way his cock throbs heavy inside him, and his next breath is a deep, luxurious moan. Sick son of a bitch, he’d _loved _that. When he turns his head forward again and his eyes slide open, they’re brilliant like Kihyun has rarely seen before, and Kihyun snatches his cradling hand away as though burned. “Fuck,” Changkyun grits out, his voice the darkest smoke. “If you do that again I might just come.”

“You—!” Kihyun starts, then stops, overwhelmed, and cuts them both off with a messy, desperate kiss, every inch of his own body aching so profoundly that he can no longer stay still. Changkyun is a pervert, a degenerate, a libertine, and worst and best of all, he’s _his, _and Kihyun will slap him a thousand times if he’ll look at him like that with each blow. He’d known Changkyun was depraved, their fun over the past couple of months has made that very clear, but now he truly sees the extent of it, the depth, the breadth, and all he can think — before his mind can no longer hold onto any of the thoughts slipping through that fevered scape — is that he’s so glad _he’s _the one who got to Changkyun first, not someone else who wouldn’t know how to pry this oyster open to reach the pearl, someone who might break the shell first and ruin the flesh within. Kihyun’s kisses are like so many little wounds, and Changkyun with his new strength lifts Kihyun and himself both off the chaise and takes them to the floor, and Kihyun starts bringing a hand up to try and— he doesn’t even know what, to slap Changkyun again or to claw his nails down his chest or to pull his hair, but Changkun catches him by the wrist and pushes it down against the soft cold floor, pinned. Kihyun flexes his arm but Changkyun doesn’t let up. It’s very nearly like a fight, and when Changkyun gets close enough to kiss again, Kihyun bites his mouth open, then pushes his tongue inside to stifle Changkyun’s moan. 

How fitting, for something so unpretty to happen in such an ethereal space — Kihyun never could just enjoy something for what it’s worth. Of course he’d spoil this, too, poison it and blacken it like the parasite that he is. His most willing host spreads Kihyun’s legs wider and fucks Kihyun to the point of incoherence, and maybe he’ll let Kihyun have him next, too, face-first in a bed of flowers for the whole world to see while Kihyun makes him sob, but for now he’s getting distracted, his hold on Kihyun’s wrist — gentle, always gentle, not even enough to smart for the briefest second — loosening such that Kihyun can grab at him with both hands, finally, and it’s been so long since he’s let Changkyun come inside him, and he can tell how badly poor Changkyun wants it, that the thought of it is driving him to madness. It’s so much a mirror-image of the way they’d fucked on this day exactly a year ago, but the reflection is distorted, warped, into a shape Kihyun finds more palatable. Changkyun loves him. Changkyun loves him _like this. _Kihyun scrapes his nails down Changkyun’s back and his head rolls to the side and he stares down the red furrowed length of _Amaranthus caudatus,_ love-lies-bleeding, and Kihyun can’t bear it, it’s too much, he looks at Changkyun again but that’s far, far worse. Changkyun is a constant, and he will remain so, a touchstone of Kihyun’s life, the albatross around his neck, unless and until Kihyun gets rid of him. The way he’s looking down at Kihyun as he fucks him deep and messy and rough exactly the way Kihyun wants him to— Kihyun should pry his jaw loose and stuff his mouth with belladonna, hemlock, oleander, but how can he picture Changkyun dead when Changkyun has never been more alive? Finally virile, finally something near to an equal, one cheek redder than the other but the other still so warm, his adoration palpable, his hands unsteadied, everything on the line, all for Kihyun. His cock feels so big— Kihyun moans as much— and there’s nothing else but this, than the way Changkyun touches him, regards him, longs for him, consumes him, gives him pleasure again and again and again and again—

How did they get here? How did he get here? And how the fuck does he get out?

_MONTH 21_

Kihyun used to loathe coming home to him. Now, it’s almost fun. There’s no harm in merely acknowledging, at least to himself, that he’s gotten off-track; if anything, that’s motivation in getting back on-track. In the meantime, they have fun. Kihyun fucks Changkyun against the nearest available wall, twists his arm behind his back just to enjoy his pained whine. Changkyun thinks he’s the only one with enhanced stamina around these parts? Kihyun has been holding out on him for a _year. _Christmas goes by in a flash — they don’t have much left to give each other, and God knows Kihyun didn’t particularly bother, but on Kihyun’s nightstand there had been a small present, no note, very neatly wrapped for once. He must have practiced. Kihyun had sat on the edge of the bed and torn the paper open to find a box containing a USB drive, and once plugged into his computer, he’d found that it contained the thousand-plus pictures taken by the photographer at their wedding. Last year he’d gotten his own Hasselblad, and this year, he gets photos that someone else took on an inferior camera? Some present. He spends an hour going through the album regardless, and when he rejoins Changkyun afterward, he’s not in a talking mood.

_MONTH 22_

“You haven’t let me kiss you in a few days,” Changkyun says, voice altogether too low, standing altogether too close. He’d never force any affection on Kihyun, they both know that, but this, this closeness, is as near to it as he’ll get.

Idiot. Kihyun, pitying and scornful, tilts his head and permits Changkyun to come closer, and Changkyun’s hands rest on his hips, warm over the thin fabric of his sweater. “I didn’t even notice,” Kihyun shrugs. “Just get it over with, then.”

Changkyun, pathetic bastard, leaps at the chance, his desert-withered eyes lighting upon an oasis — he must be scared Kihyun will change his mind. He leans in and kisses him, as wet and searching as ever, all his tender pent-up longing and love with no outlet finding an outlet here. Kihyun knows how much he loves to kiss, and denying him that simple pleasure is another new game, one with even hastier-defined rules than all previous. Might a kinder man than Kihyun suggest Changkyun look to fulfill his romantic pleasures elsewhere? Sure, and a man less smitten than Changkyun might actually do it. But Kihyun is still no kinder, and Changkyun, despite everything, is no less smitten, and so this is how they remain.

Kihyun’s hands come up and he cradles the back of Changkyun’s head, fingers pushing into his thick black hair to pet over the very base of his skull where it meets the top of his neck. A soft gesture, a nice one, something he used to do all the time before they got married but has hardly ever done since. It works; Changkyun’s resolve goes immediately and he whimpers out a helpless, accidental noise, his own hands tightening on Kihyun’s waist. He’s so melodramatic. Kihyun fucked him last night, it’s not like they never touch. Kihyun keeps his fingers petting over him for as long as he can bear it, for as long as he can tolerate the hungry way Changkyun licks into his mouth, then tilts his head to break away. “Better?”

Changkyun nods. His eyes are so dark, too. “Just don’t let it get to a few weeks.”

As if he has a choice in the matter!

Changkyun’s birthday is largely uneventful. The company arranges a small celebration, which Kihyun and Changkyun skip, and Changkyun shows Kihyun an e-card from Wonho and Shownu that he’d received earlier that day, grinning from ear to ear, so happy to have been remembered. Kihyun had intended on possibly, if he was in the right mindset, cooking for him, but in the end they’d just gotten delivery, and that had been a treat enough in itself. They sit at a prim five-inch distance apart on the couch and watch a movie, one of Changkyun’s love-to-hate favorites, _Jupiter _fucking _Ascending_. Kihyun has never heard of it before, and he wishes it had stayed that way. It’s appalling. Kihyun eyes Mila Kunis with distaste and leans over to murmur, “She should have stuck with Ashton Kutcher,” and that makes Changkyun laugh, his most childish and startled laugh that shows off all his teeth, and Kihyun is startled by such an effusive expression of joy and leans away again. 

They watch another half-hour in silence. Finally Kihyun can’t take it any longer and says, “Your _one _chance to pick a movie for us to watch, and you choose _this?”_

“I forgot it was this bad,” Changkyun explains readily, laughing again. “We can turn it off if you really hate it.”

Kihyun watches with disinterest as noted Hollywood prettyboy Douglas Booth overtly implies being sexually attracted to his own mother. “No, it’s fine,” he says, belatedly. 

“If you’re sure,” Changkyun says. He’s always so gracious, and Kihyun resents him for his easy patience, reaches across the space between them to take his hand to shut him up.

“Don’t push it,” he says, and they watch the film to the end.

_MONTH 23_

Five months. Nearly half a year since Kihyun was meant to do it. If it gets to six months, Kihyun may as well kill _himself. _So this is it. Do or die, but someone’s dying either way. How did this happen? How did he let it get this bad? It’s not like they’ve been up to much, really. The walls are beginning to close in on them both. Kihyun hasn’t spoken to him in a week, let alone kissed him, or held his hand, or let Changkyun kiss him first. They’ve been fucking, which is fine, but that is starting to become routine, too, typical cruelty and restraint, nothing new left to discover. The ebbs and flows of their relationship are tiring even to Kihyun, and he’s sure Changkyun must be even more affected, stumbling in his haste to keep up, stumbling like he’s on the home stretch of a marathon and Kihyun is waiting at the finish line by the guillotine. It’ll be better for them both, once he’s dead. They’re both tired. This will give them a nice break.

_Tonight, _Kihyun thinks, looking at Changkyun across the breakfast table. In a way, it’s almost fitting that he’s been planning and scheming for so long but is going to do it practically on impulse. That will make sure he doesn’t have enough time for distractions. Changkyun is going to be gone all day, anyway, because lately, Kihyun has been insisting on him going to work. It’s good for Changkyun to get out of the house, something like a hobby, and Kihyun, similarly in Manhattan, spends hours staring at his blue dot in the tracker app to make sure he’s where he’s supposed to be. Changkyun no longer takes the train, but they commute separately. He only goes twice a week, usually, but it’s better than not at all. He’s dressed and ready to go today, his dark-wash jeans, a Valentino sweater with a lurid print of an astronaut, not exactly work-appropriate, but Kihyun has given up on trying to make him presentable. He’s not talking. He has no idea what Kihyun is going to do. He smiles at him before he gets his coat and his car keys, and Kihyun half-hopes he crashes on the way, his Maserati warped and wrecked or sinking numbly to the bottom of the Hudson, to spare him from the rest. 

It’s only after Changkyun is gone, having lingered for just a moment longer than he usually does to wish Kihyun a good day and ask if he wants him to get anything specific on his way back — though of course Kihyun usually goes into the city, too, and is perfectly capable of getting everything himself — that Kihyun checks his phone and realizes that today is the 14th. Valentine’s Day. Fuck, will it look too obvious, then, if Changkyun— no. Kihyun cuts that train of thought off before it can leave the station, rails all twisted up. It’s today. It has to be today. Or— Kihyun doesn’t even know what. There is no _or. _It’s today.

So he stays home instead of going into the city. Everything has to be perfect. Doing it at home was always the best option, explaining away the overpresence of Kihyun’s fingerprints, no witnesses. He goes to the wine cellar and picks out two bottles of red, reads in Changkyun’s boring oenology book about how best to ventilate and serve his selections, comes back upstairs and sits in the kitchen and stares at nothing in particular for a good hour. Changkyun texts him at 5 o’clock: _Headed home. Really bad traffic, back by 7. _Kihyun opens one of the bottles and pours himself a glass. It’s drained soon enough, so he has another. But he must be overcome with some kind of adrenaline, because he feels no different whatsoever, so he has a third, and he’s barely eaten all day so _now _he feels a little warm, but only a little. He dims the lights in the kitchen and puts on a CD to play over their built-in surround-sound speakers, old Sinatra, and thinks about Edgar Allan Poe. _Nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am. _But as for never having been kinder to the old man than during the whole week before he kills him, Kihyun can hardly relate. And he’s not nervous, either. His heart is beating calmly in his chest, telling no tales. The garage door begins to open and Kihyun fills the second glass.

Changkyun comes in with a quiet sigh, but he stops while taking his jacket off to hang up by the entrance, Kihyun hears the cessation of his movements. “Kihyun?”

“In here,” Kihyun says. The music isn’t very loud, but Changkyun can certainly hear it, and his steps are cautious and slow as he approaches and sees the lowered lights, the two glasses of wine, and Kihyun himself.

“What’s all this?” Changkyun asks. All of a sudden he sounds out of breath. 

Kihyun pushes one of the glasses a few inches further along the marble top of the island in his direction. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

“Oh,” Changkyun says. It’s not an illusion when his lower lip trembles, and he has to look away for just a moment, like a child abandoned in a thunderstorm, shutting his eyes against the lightning. “Oh, Kihyun.”

“Come sit,” Kihyun continues, tilting his head to invite him over. “I got started without you, sorry.”

“No, no, it’s okay— _I’m _sorry, I didn’t get you anything, I didn’t think you— I’m sorry,” Changkyun says, and hesitantly approaches the island to sit in the other stool and take the other glass of wine. He has dark circles under his eyes that haven’t always been there, and suddenly Kihyun remembers why Februaries are hard for Changkyun. Poetic justice, isn’t it, for him to die in the same month as his parents, seven lucky years after the fact. Fuck. Changkyun takes a sip of the wine and smiles at Kihyun so softly, and Kihyun looks away, topping up his own glass instead. 

Changkyun must be expecting conversation, but Kihyun doesn’t want to talk. In thirty more minutes he’ll switch them to liquor. “How was your day?” Changkyun prompts gently and Kihyun just lifts a noncommittal shoulder: it was fine. His glass is already half-gone, and Kihyun leans across the island to pour it full, the bottle nearly out. He’d very nearly expected Changkyun to shrink away at the proximity, what with the way he looks at Kihyun the way that a lamb looks at a butcher, but Changkyun stays where he is, still just looking. Another smile begins on his face. He thinks Kihyun just wants to sit in silence and enjoy each other’s company, but Kihyun can’t— doesn’t want to— speak for fear of saying something that would alert him to Kihyun’s true intentions and frighten him away into someone else’s arms. They drink, in silence. Changkyun keeps sneaking glances, and Kihyun does not return them. 

“Do you want dinner?” Changkyun asks after the second bottle has been opened, and Kihyun shakes his head. So Changkyun, refusing to take the hint, presses, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Kihyun says, twitchy, and gets up off the stool to cross tersely to the liquor cabinet. “Brandy? Scotch? Gin?”

Changkyun doesn’t answer, and Kihyun frowns back over his shoulder to find Changkyun distracted, that next-room-over look he gets sometimes. “Oh, um,” he says once he sees Kihyun’s face, “a martini, but I can make it.”

“Sure,” Kihyun says and takes the gin down for him, but he’ll let him do the rest. “Make me one, too.”

Changkyun won’t ask if he’s alright again, he knows better than to make that particular mistake twice. At least, Kihyun hopes he knows. But they finish off the second bottle of wine and Changkyun’s cheeks have been so pink for so long and he can’t really stop smiling, something dopey and private into his glass, and Kihyun looks out of the window to see the cloudless sky and sees the whole history of their twenty three months together flashing by, reflections on the glass. Changkyun mixes martinis for them and does a little dance as he comes over with the shaker, and Kihyun doesn’t even have the energy to snap at him not to spill anything. His head is beginning to fog in earnest. No neighbors around for miles. After one more drink, Changkyun will be pliant in mind as in body, and he’ll take any suggestion Kihyun gives him, he’d slit his own throat if handed the knife. He makes a good martini. 

He’s no longer smiling by the time the martinis are gone. It’s not that he senses something impending, he lacks any sense of premonition completely, but Kihyun’s taciturnity is rubbing off on him, as it always does. Just like at dinner, that one dinner at Daniel, he’s likely wondering whether Kihyun is going to serve him with divorce papers. How much simpler would that be for him? Maybe that would kill him even worse than death itself. Kihyun glances out of the window again; it’s gotten later, night has fallen fully. Changkyun is more than a little drunk, Kihyun no better off. Frank Sinatra is crooning about leaving, and Kihyun senses his cue to go.

“Another?” Changkyun offers in his low, unslurred voice, and Kihyun shakes his head.

“I want,” Kihyun says, “to go look at the stars.”

It takes Changkyun a moment to understand what Kihyun is even talking about. “Oh!” he says once he realizes. “Yeah, yeah, let’s do it! I’ll bring a blanket?”

“Not in the backyard,” Kihyun dismisses. “Too many trees.”

“Okay,” Changkyun agrees. “Too many trees, okay. Where do you, do you wanna go?”

Kihyun counts to five. The police can’t interrogate a dead body to ask about Kihyun’s behavior prior to the push. “On the roof,” he says once five is up. “Come on.” And he tries for a smile, aims for mischievous and fun-loving, the Kihyun that Changkyun fell in love with and signed his whole life away to. Even holds his hand out for further impact. And Changkyun, gullible, sweet, naïve as he’s ever been, after each and every time Kihyun has shown him his true colors, smiles a lottery winner’s smile and takes Kihyun’s fingers in his own and lets Kihyun lead him up the stairs, both of them bracing their free hands on the railings, to the third floor. 

“We can get onto the roof through here?” Changkyun says, giggling incredulously, and Kihyun, his serious Svengali, nods and takes him to one of the guest rooms, where they open the window together and step out onto the cornice one by one.

It’s higher than Kihyun had thought it would be. They grapple their way up to the edge of the widest dormer, then at Kihyun’s muted urging, all the way to the peak of the house itself, nothing below them but infinite, eye-blurring shingles and, eventually, the hard earth. They perch, lovebird-nestled, and Kihyun’s stomach turns and turns again and now is _not _the time to develop a fear of heights, so he scoots to sit closer to Changkyun, and his arm goes around Changkyun’s lower back to brace his hand on the other side. 

“It’s beautiful up here,” Changkyun murmurs, his breath puffing white into the black sky. “So quiet.”

Kihyun squeezes his eyes closed for a moment. He wishes Changkyun would be quiet, that would make it so— so much easier. _Do it, _he begs himself fiercely. _At least try. _His hand trembles when he lifts it off the edge of the roof and places it, just for a moment, against the small of Changkyun’s back. Changkyun is not holding tightly to the ridge cap. He would fall in a second. He would fall so fast. “What it is,” Kihyun says, he can’t breathe, his tongue won’t turn in his mouth, “is fucking _cold—”_

And his teeth are chattering and he starts to shift to get a better angle, more leverage, a harder push, but then _he _starts to slip, just a tiny bit, and his breath gasps out of him in fear. He’s gripping the slate of the roof so hard that the edges of the shingles start to cut his hands. “Fuck,” he pants unsteadily, and Changkyun, loyal, noble Changkyun, Changkyun, without saying anything, holds out his arm.

Kihyun only hesitates for a second before grabbing it too tightly so there’s no chance at all of him falling alone. But really because he knows Changkyun won’t let him fall. He burrows into Changkyun’s side, breath still fast in his throat and his lungs beginning to freeze, and holds onto him as desperately as he can. “Maybe we should go back inside,” Changkyun suggests very, very softly. They haven’t even looked at the stars yet. Kihyun knows his grip is too strong and that Changkyun must be in pain, but Changkyun won’t tell him to stop. That’s it. It’s over. Kihyun couldn’t do it. He failed. Changkyun carefully guides them both down back through the window, his hands still somehow warm, so gentle as he helps Kihyun down off the windowsill and back inside.

They look at each other. Kihyun takes a breath.

“Stay where you are,” is the only thing Kihyun can manage to say to him, then rushes to the nearest bathroom, door slammed behind him, and vomits. 

“Kihyun?” says Changkyun’s wan, concerned voice outside the door. “Kihyun, my love? Are you okay? Can I get you some water?”

“Don’t come in,” Kihyun says hoarsely. “Please leave me alone, Changkyun.”

“I’m not just going to leave you alone,” Changkyun mumbles.

Kihyun coughs and wipes off his mouth. He’s so tired. He’s so, so tired. _That’s exactly what I’m afraid of, _he thinks, feels it coming over him again, closes his eyes, and lets go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/paratazxis) (+ tip jar link therein, if interested) (and feel free to use #FoolproofAO3!!!), [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/paratazxis), [official playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/12MLmAfM9PhFB63N7EWMww?si=yQVn9E5ZR_-1vJVLkdfFFg), [More Fun playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4uy2Cl1pvB2ebqD4mUEJ75?si=26jS0Ry5SmyqOP3TqGegmQ)
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> stunning art of changki's tortured marriage can be found right [here](https://twitter.com/paratazxis/status/1289234557204480000)
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> !!! please let me know what you thought of this chapter by commenting or coming to chat at any of the links above!! thank you so much for reading, and i hope you are all continuing to enjoy!!!!!
> 
> EDIT: due to the quarantine i have a ton more free time and have been writing a lot, so i will now be updating **every two weeks, **so chapter 7 will be posted on **april 10. ** if you're interested in getting an email update, dont forget to LIKE and SUBSCRIBE!!! see yall next time for some more murder happy fun time <3
> 
> ps i told u to look out for chapter 6 ;)


	7. Months 24-26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scenes from the death of a marriage; Kihyun succeeds this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: rough sex, suicidal ideation, gratuitous usage of sylvia plath

_MONTH 24_

Kihyun should have just fucking gone on antidepressants. It would have killed his sex drive, made him clear-headed, dangerously energized to get the murder done, but it’s too fucking late now. There’s not even a point in trying again, because if he hadn’t been able to do it once, there’s nothing, nothing, that could give him the power going forward. His homicidal impotence speaks to an internal defect, some kind of fatal flaw, a hamartia for his hubris, and it’s not like figuring out the cause would solve the problem, but it might make it easier for him to live with the consequences of his inaction. 

Was it fear of getting caught? Was it, God forbid, a conscience? Sometimes he wishes he could just ask Changkyun directly: why didn’t I kill you? It should have all been so easy. Yet again Kihyun imagines a world where they’re both born two centuries early and he pushes Changkyun in front of a horse-drawn carriage in the cobbled streets of London, then goes and dies himself in an illicit duel over someone else’s honor. Sure, the absence of any pressing need to plan a funeral can be attributed to the time they live in. Getting away with a proper first-degree murder is so fucking hard these days. Forensics, security cameras, Amazon Echos spying on each and every move. It must be that. External circumstances combined with obvious and painful inadequacy on Kihyun’s part. It has to be that. Because if it isn’t, Kihyun has no idea what it could possibly be.

At any rate, Changkyun is none the wiser. He has no idea he nearly died two weeks ago. He has no idea that Kihyun has killed him a million times over since before they even met. He eats his stupid breakfast and wears his stupid sweaters and waits, always waits so patiently, and it’s strange lying next to someone and knowing how they ache for your touch, for your closeness, knowing this for certain and yet doing absolutely nothing to alleviate their pain, and they’ve been together for _two years. _Two years. Kihyun has observed him so closely that he thinks he knows Changkyun better than he knows who he used to be, before all this. That must be another part of it. He spent so long being focused on Changkyun, blinders locked, vision tunneled, that he forgot about his own priorities, his own value, his own happy fucking ending, and now he’s left with this, a husband he doesn’t love, a house that’s not a home, and no multimillion-dollar fortune entirely at his disposal. 

Maybe Kihyun is simply too used to him. Would a farmer hesitate to butcher a pig he’d raised since infancy? Slit the throat of a cow he feeds each morning? Arms up to the elbows in the blood of something he pulled into the world of the living. Kihyun would read up on the subject, but he fears it would make him queasy. So he stews in his own philosophy and watches Changkyun while he sleeps — Changkyun always drifts off faster than he does — and searches for an answer that, well, he can be honest for once, he knows will never come.

For instance, this. They run into each other for lunch, but Kihyun suspects it wasn’t entirely coincidental — that friend-tracker app goes both ways. He’s sitting alone in a window booth and the waiter brings him a gyokuro sencha tea that Kihyun didn’t order and when Kihyun says, _I didn’t order this, _the waiter smiles and says, “It’s from that gentleman over there.”

“Oh,” says Kihyun, lip curling for a moment. “That’s my husband.”

The waiter is visibly thrown by his expression and tone, shouldn’t that be a good thing, that his husband has just surprised him with exorbitantly expensive tea? And Changkyun looks so hopeful, he should be humiliated for making a face like that in public, and Kihyun just— _someone _needs to put him out of his misery in one way or another, and if he couldn’t do it on Valentine’s Day on the roof, he can at least do this. He takes his coat and his tea and joins Changkyun at his table, tilting his cheek appropriately for Changkyun to press a kiss in the softest space above his jaw. 

“Fancy meeting you here,” Changkyun beams.

Kihyun gives him a look that’s an unambiguous _don’t, _so Changkyun doesn’t anymore, just quiets down and sips his own matching tea and smiles at Kihyun over the dainty gilded rim of his cup. “I thought you said the food at work is amazing,” Kihyun says, deceptively neutral.

“It is!” Changkyun is quick to confirm, so effusive, so thrilled that Kihyun had remembered. “You should really come try it sometime, it’s—”

“So why aren’t you having lunch there?” Kihyun finishes, for all the world as kindly condescending as if interrogating a kindergartener.

Changkyun realizes that he’s been caught in a trap and his effusiveness pops crisply and cleanly, tattered fragments sinking down as his eyes go all closed-off and his smile freezes. “Oh. I— I don’t know, I… just wanted a change of scenery?” he attempts after a moment.

“There’s no point in lying,” Kihyun shrugs. “You know I like this place, so you knew I’d be here. You see me every night, is that not enough for you? At least try to maintain some consistency in your little stories. It’ll save us both a lot of time.”

Changkyun’s already-small lips go smaller. He looks down into his cup, but finds no guidance in his tea leaves. “Right,” he says. “I was— I really only mention that the food at work is good all the time because I thought maybe you’d come join me there someday, and I know you wouldn’t come just to see me, so.”

Something flares. Not anger— something else. Kihyun ignores it for now. “Why would I do that? There’s no shortage of good lunch in this city.”

“It’s really good, and it’s free, I don’t know,” Changkyun mumbles.

“Free,” Kihyun repeats, his tone as disbelieving as it is disdainful. “What, like we can’t afford a decent meal? It’s _always _free.”

“I’m sorry,” Changkyun says again. Oh, God, he’s upset. That’s what that face means, the way his hands are pulled together, stiff knuckles pushing against each other, his eyes darting over the surface of the table but not daring to lift and regard Kihyun. That something, that something in Kihyun’s chest between his third and fourth ribs, flares again, and he frowns, too, sets his cup down on the table, and makes an awkward, aborted gesture, almost like he was going to reach for Changkyun’s hands to untangle those nervous knots, but he stops himself before he can move. He’s not sure why he’d want to do that. He puts his hands in his lap instead.

“For bothering you,” Changkyun adds, softer.

God, he’s _really _upset. The tea is no longer sweet in aftertaste on Kihyun’s lips. “It’s okay,” he says with a light shrug. Belated somewhat, like he was thinking of the right response, but he wasn’t, he was just distracted. Is that his heart? What’s hurting? What _is _that? “I appreciate the tea,” he adds, but it sounds stilted, insincere, and he frowns again, trying to place what, exactly, is wrong.

“I know you like your solitude,” Changkyun continues as though Kihyun hadn’t even spoken, still in that oppressed and hollow tone of voice. “I shouldn’t have tried to interfere.”

“Changkyun, it’s fine, you can want to get lunch with me,” Kihyun says. Why is he bothering? What is he doing? “I’ll… come to the office. If you really think I’d like it.”

He’d expected that to have a bigger effect than it does. Changkyun just exhales quietly through his nose and his little lips lift in a cursory smile, and he says, “Well, you’ve been before.”

“I meant the food,” Kihyun says. “I liked the office itself just fine.”

“You’re welcome anytime,” Changkyun says. He carefully wipes the corners of his mouth with his cloth napkin, though there wasn’t anything to blot away. “It’s your company, too, after all.”

“I’m sorry,” Kihyun says all of a sudden, rather apropos of nothing, and _that _gets a big reaction, Changkyun pausing like a deer in the headlights, staring his imminent death in the face and too frightened even to blink. “I’m…” He searches for the words, but saying he’s glad Changkyun is here would be a lie, and he promised himself he wouldn’t lie to make Changkyun happy anymore, it’s past that point. “I appreciate the tea,” he finishes, repetitive though it is, because— that’s the only true thing he can say, and he doesn’t know why he has this impulse to apologize, to smooth out that labored wrinkle in Changkyun’s forehead, why he cares, but here he is, and that’s the most he can muster without debasing himself along with Changkyun.

In a way, it works. Changkyun no longer looks quite so stricken. “I’m glad,” he replies, simple as ever, and when he smiles again, the flare in Kihyun’s chest lessens, but does not vanish completely.

They share the rest of their meal in silence, thankfully. As Changkyun eats, he seems to relax, to forgive Kihyun for his impulsive needling, and Kihyun relaxes, too, regaining his control over himself and setting that odd pain in his chest aside to unpack later. Fuck, he shouldn’t have apologized. That makes him look so weak. The slipperiest of slopes; if Changkyun begins to expect apologies from Kihyun, what else will he grow to take for granted? Kindness, tenderness, have all been off the table since their honeymoon concluded, and if Changkyun starts to forget, Kihyun doesn’t know if he can trust himself to remind him. He couldn’t even kill him, for fuck’s sake. Maybe he is as pathetic as Changkyun. It’s an unpleasant thought, and Kihyun’s typically ever-changing mood seems determined to be black today, so he leans into his impatience and leaves before Changkyun is finished eating, making up a vague excuse that Changkyun didn’t even ask for about having an “appointment” in Hell’s Kitchen. 

“See you at home,” Changkyun says. His smile is back to normal. Kihyun kisses him for it, right on the mouth, right in front of everyone, and regrets it as soon as it’s over, but at least now Changkyun is definitely done being upset. 

“You can walk me to my car,” Kihyun says just to do something else with his mouth. “It’s valeted at the Mercer.”

Changkyun isn’t done, but he pays the tabs and says he’ll be back in a few minutes to have one last espresso, then holds the door for Kihyun even though the maitre d’ tries to get there first. He smiles at Kihyun, one hand buttoning up his coat, the other obviously available for the holding, but Kihyun doesn’t take the bait; he’s done enough damage to his own self-image for the day. It’s a crisp afternoon and he’s thinking about the Porsche’s heated seats, as well as trying to decide where to go next, maybe he’ll just go home and take an hour-long bath and go to sleep before Changkyun returns from work so he won’t have to face him, and he’s distracted enough by his thoughts that he allows Changkyun to very gently guide him by the elbow to turn left, since despite Kihyun’s best efforts, Changkyun still knows Soho better than he does. 

“Big plans for the rest of the day?” Changkyun asks.

Since he’d taken his hand away again after no more than three seconds and Kihyun hasn’t fully shaken his odd response to their interaction at lunch, he deigns to answer, barely remembering his previous excuse in time: “After my appointment, probably back home.”

“You drove all the way out here just for lunch?” Changkyun smiles. “Wow, you do really like that place.”

Kihyun’s frown is immediate, but Changkyun isn’t teasing him, he’s genuinely endeared by Kihyun expressing such a strong preference. But even his endearment feels patronizing today, so Kihyun says nothing in return, privately seething. God, what is going on with him? Changkyun is obviously fine, he always bounces right back after Kihyun puts him through the wringer, and yet Kihyun is still out of sorts despite his best efforts to ignore whatever has him feeling so strange. “So what?” is all he can come up with, and he winces immediately at how puerile that sounds, so weakly petty, but Changkyun’s smile is bulletproof when he turns to look at Kihyun, his hair tossed into his eyes for a moment by the winter’s-end breeze. 

“No, nothing. I just thought you didn’t like being a regular anywhere, but all the waiters knew you,” he says, and starts to cross the street.

It’s a red light and Changkyun is a chronic jaywalker, one of those New York City boys who thinks he has a sixth sense for oncoming traffic, except he really, _really _doesn’t, and Kihyun looks left when Changkyun is still looking at him and all of a sudden there’s a car, a fast one, and Kihyun makes an incoherent noise and grabs the back of Changkyun’s coat and yanks him back, hard, directly out of the street, and the car whizzes by with a loud honk and Changkyun kind of laughs and Kihyun’s hands, white-knuckled, are still holding tight to the fabric of his coat. God, he might be sick, Changkyun almost got run over by a _car _just now, it had been so close, one more second, one wrong move and he’d have— Kihyun takes another step back well onto the sidewalk, safe and sound, with his hold on Changkyun’s coat pulling him along. 

“Whoa,” Changkyun says. “Close one.”

Kihyun wants to shove him right back into the road for that, but instead he grips his coat even tighter. “Look both ways before you cross,” he says, so out of breath from the adrenaline of nearly— nearly— that he can hardly speak. “How many times do I have to tell you? It’s just basic survival instincts, Changkyun.”

“I know,” Changkyun says, actually contrite for once. He leans in, hesitant, and Kihyun doesn’t lean away, standing stiffly as Changkyun presses his lips to the corner of Kihyun’s mouth. Hit by a car, his blood all over the street, the seas of people parting around him to make way for the ambulance, for Kihyun to fall to his knees and take his broken head into his lap and hold him until help arrives. Changkyun is saying something else, apologizing, but Kihyun can’t hear it, doesn’t want to hear it, can’t be here right now, he needs to _go_. He pulls away from him abruptly, plants Changkyun in place by pushing on the middle of his chest, and crosses the street alone on the green light, no looking back. 

Only when the valet has brought him his car — and just in time, too, Kihyun has gone half-crazy, was seconds away from asking random passersby if he could bum a cigarette — and Kihyun is safely buckled in does he dare to look across the street again, and Changkyun isn’t there anymore. Find Friends reveals that he just returned to the café. Always none the wiser. Good thing Kihyun really does have plans in Hell’s Kitchen, because if he had to make the hour-long drive home right now, in this condition, he simply wouldn’t have made it there, he can’t be alone with his own thoughts when his thoughts are like _this. _He takes deep breaths. Gets stuck in traffic. Not even the radio helps. He can’t get it off his mind, he’s caught in his own web, and if it had just been one thing, one isolated incident of uncharacteristic kindness, that would have been bad, sure, but not fatal, but two all at once? Kihyun does like things to be incontrovertible, and it doesn’t get more incontrovertible than this. Maybe it was always only a matter of time, but here he is now, he can’t escape it, it has come for him: Kihyun is being plagued by guilt.

And— guilt over _what? _God, it’s all so fucking stupid. He has committed several thoughtcrimes at absolute worst. Is there any married man on Earth who hasn’t wished his spouse dead? He has no reason to feel guilty. The way he treats Changkyun, it’s— it’s irrelevant to the validity of his guilt, or lack thereof, because Changkyun likes it, he likes getting slapped around during sex and when Kihyun ignores him for days on end, and Kihyun likes it, too, it’s better this way, less strain on him to perform for Changkyun all the time, he can just do whatever he wants and Changkyun will follow, but— the guilt remains. 

It feels like his life is counting down. But his previous countdown was clearly a failure, as well as rescheduled constantly due to his own weakness, so he can’t imagine what he’s waiting for now. For the guilt to pass, maybe, so he can try again. But he knows he won’t be able to try again. He had his chance and he missed it. Wasted it, no less, on actually _saving _Changkyun’s life when he didn’t even know it was under threat. Kihyun wants to scream, he wants to throw something, he wants to lock himself away and never speak to another human being again, never let Changkyun look at him again, but he can’t do that, he can’t do anything, nothing that he really wants to do, and there’s no point, and— he gets his eyebrows threaded and feels better, but not by much, not for long.

This is a feeling he doesn’t know he’s ever experienced before. He’s been _guilty, _sure, after one too many missed get-togethers in college, but for the most part, he accepts very little responsibility for the hurt of others. Guilty on occasion, but never so full of guilt to the point that it’s not a feeling he’s having but a feeling that he _is. _Oppenheimer, Death, destroyer of worlds. Kihyun Yoo, guilt, destroyer of nothing at all, because he doesn’t have the fucking nerve. 

He drives home with NPR on full blast, because even though normally he can’t stand the reedy pretentiousness of Ira Glass, it’s better than just sitting alone with only this feeling of guilt for a companion, like some kind of pet or bastard child, staring at him and wordlessly demanding attention, to be fed. He keeps telling himself he has no reason to be guilty, he’s done nothing wrong, to think of doing something and to do it are very different things, and isn’t his inaction what he should truly be all out of sorts over? He entered into this for _one _purpose, one purpose only, Changkyun murdered and his money in Kihyun’s pocket, that was always clear, he’s been consistent in his goals, there’s no need for guilt. Guilt is for the weak.

_You couldn’t do it, _says the snide little voice in the back of Kihyun’s head. _Not even bloodlessly, without getting your hands dirty. Doesn’t that make you weak?_

Kihyun grits his teeth. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to talk himself out of this one, but what’s his other option, groveling at Changkyun’s feet, begging for forgiveness? Sucking up to him in an attempt to compensate for his past actions? But he _hasn’t _done anything, there’s nothing to compensate _for, _this is all so _stupid—_

At the end of their driveway, Kihyun’s phone lights up with a text, and he glances down to see it’s from Changkyun. He doesn’t even need to open the notification to know approximately what it says; it’s almost certainly an inquiry as to whether he made it home safely. Kihyun’s guilt is sharp and uncomfortable and totally, completely unwarranted, Changkyun doesn’t deserve any attempts to play nice, and from now on, Kihyun is just going to avoid him entirely, not give in to any of his requests, no matter how sad he looks when he’s making them, and that’s how he’s going to surmount this thing. Avoidance. Isolation. Restraint. Nothing more, nothing less. Totally feasible. No need for guilt. Kihyun’s hands shake as he unlocks his phone to delete the text, which reads, _It was so wonderful to see you today._

_MONTH 25_

“Thirty-third floor,” he tells the elevator, which has no buttons, only a large screen prompting him to state his destination. How very cutting-edge. The doors slide closed and the elevator begins to rise, and Kihyun wonders what else has changed about the KB Pharmaceuticals office since his last visit, so long ago he’s honestly forgotten how Changkyun managed to wheedle him into coming in the first place. He’s alone in the elevator, and takes the opportunity of solitude to fix his hair, using the perfect steel wall as a mirror and hanging his sunglasses in the collar of his shirt. This is his first appearance at KB since their marriage, since his addition to the executive board, and it’s important, he knows that, because— well, his original plan was that after Changkyun had died, he’d be taking on a much more significant role here, but clearly that phase of his life is going to need a little recalibration. Either way, it’s nice to have such a large stake in such a wealthy company, so this is an important day, an important moment, and he has to make it count.

The elevator stops before reaching 33, though, and two more people get on at 29, a man and a woman. Before they turn around to face the doors, Kihyun spots the KB logo on the folder that the woman is holding and stands even straighter, perfectly coiffed, perfectly poised, although he hasn’t seen these two before and there’s no chance at all that they know who he is. If anything, this is even better, he’s incognito, and if they’re polite to him, then he’ll spare Changkyun some harshness, but if not, the consequences will certainly be dire. More likely than not, they’ll just ignore him, but—

“Good luck with the presentation,” says the woman, and the man laughs, shaking his head.

“Not gonna need it. _He_ couldn’t tell the difference between Hepavax and Hantavax if it bit him in the ass,” he says, and then they both laugh conspiratorially, bumping their shoulders together. 

Kihyun has the sinking feeling that he knows who is being discussed. He affects neutrality, eyes fixed somewhere around the mirrored ceiling. Floor 30, then 31, and—

“Like, why even bother coming in every day? What are his qualifications? I know I keep talking about this, but it’s just bullshit,” the man continues. “First he plays hooky for a straight year, then all of a sudden it’s all—” And here he drops his voice into a cartoonish, caveman imitation of Changkyun, all low and dopey and sounding nothing like him in the slightest: “_oh, uh, I’m actually back? For good? And I’m gonna be watching your every move like an extra beaky hawk so I can feel better about my own nepotistic uselessness. _I mean, for cryin’ out loud, my nine-year-old cousin would be better at running this company.”

“You’re incorrigible,” says the woman with a private smile, and Kihyun doesn’t know what disgusts him more, this blatant heterosexual flirting, or this blatant, ugly insubordination. The elevator halts at the 33rd floor and the couple exits, and Kihyun stares at their retreating backs and thinks there’s no hell hot enough for idiots like that.

But Changkyun’s words echo in his head: it’s his company, too. He smooths a hand down to even out his shirt and glides forward, shoulders set firmly, head held high, and he remembers the way to Changkyun’s office perfectly so his path is unfaltering, revenge on the brain. Everything is mostly still the same along his walk — Changkyun’s assistant got promoted away from his office a long, long while ago, but his secretary is unchanged, if a little older than the last time he’d seen her. 

“Oh,” she says, blinking up over the tops of her glasses and standing up to greet him. “Mr. Im, what a wonderful surprise.”

That’s enough to snap Kihyun out of his vengeful fog temporarily, and he raises his eyebrows at her. “It’s still just Mr. Yoo,” he says with a light, false smile. “I didn’t take his name.”

She pauses, something shrewd about the way she’s looking at him, but she’s all smiles again in another second, leaving him to wonder if he’s imagining this whole morning. “Right, of course— silly me, I’m so sorry. Should I buzz you in?”

Kihyun glances back over his shoulder, spotting the offenders from the elevator engrossed in one final chat by the water cooler. They spot him, too, and smile reflexively, and he slowly smiles back, that cold-eyed smile that always leaves strangers so uneasy, and sure enough, after another moment they both look away and resume their conversation. The residents of Pompeii heartbeats before eruption. Kihyun lets them have another second of peace, then looks at the secretary again, ready to change some fucking lives. “Actually, Susanne,” he says, “I was wondering if you could help me with something first.”

Three minutes later, once everything is neatly squared away, Susanne buzzes Changkyun to let him know he has a visitor, and Kihyun goes into his office without more warning than just that. Fortunately, the blinds to the rest of the floor are already down. Changkyun, evidently expecting someone other than his husband, has to do a double-take when he looks up, but once he’s put two and two together, he’s so delighted, little kid on Christmas, literally dropping the papers out of his hands in his rush to stand up and cross over to reach Kihyun. “You’re here!”

“Yes,” Kihyun says, “great job.”

“I mean, you came!” Changkyun continues, beaming, and his hand is already outstretched to take Kihyun’s sunglasses before Kihyun can even think to pass them to him. “Great day to do it, there’s an R&D meeting at 2, or— well, the restaurant’s not serving lunch yet, but… Well, are you here to check out anything in particular?”

Kihyun can’t help himself; there’s something to be said for getting Changkyun flustered. He lets his eyes flicker down Changkyun’s body for just a moment, a subtle gesture, but Changkyun is only observant when it benefits him, so he notices, of course, and goes a giggly shade of pink, setting Kihyun’s sunglasses on his desk and bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Make yourself at home,” he says, gesturing broadly to the glorious windows, the leather couch, his desk, his chairs. If Kihyun stays still any longer, Changkyun will probably start offering him drinks, like an insistent waiter or Don Draper, so Kihyun, an expression of light amusement on his face, crosses to check out the papers Changkyun had just flung down onto his desk, click the final sphere on the Newton’s cradle that must have been a gift from someone, sometime, glance just once, disapprovingly, at the framed wedding photo by his computer monitor. It’s not dissimilar to the set-up Kihyun had at _his _office, back in the day, and that’s exactly the problem. Changkyun is sitting on an immodest fortune yet has the decorating sensibilities of an entry-level minimum wage worker. Kihyun continues past the desk and looks out the window, unable to hold back a small sigh at the view. It’s really indecently beautiful, and utterly wasted on Changkyun, but Changkyun comes to join him, standing silent by his side like a shadow, waiting for Kihyun to speak first, and Kihyun tears his eyes away from the broad toybox sprawl of Manhattan to turn and take Changkyun’s jaw in his hand and kiss him. 

That’s the thing about Changkyun. He’s at his most palatable when quiet or when getting fucked. Here at work, he’s out of sorts, not in his own, not comfortable, but still somehow hits his stride, and maybe that’s because past these doors, Changkyun is the golden calf, the big boss, like it or not, they bend to his will. He tells them to jump, they say _yes, sir. _No question. No complaints, at least not to his face. Sure, they resent him, and sure, they mock him, but he’s undeniably the most powerful person in this office. At least, he _was _until Kihyun walked in. And that makes Kihyun’s head spin faster than anything, that Changkyun controls all of them but Kihyun controls Changkyun, and he always has been suited perfectly to this role, the king’s advisor whispering poison into his ear, the loyal subjects completely unaware of what goes on beyond the throneroom. Changkyun’s mouth is opening to Kihyun’s tongue and he’s making his small, breathless noises, his hands coming up to hold onto Kihyun’s forearms, and Kihyun takes a half-step forward, guiding Changkyun back, and Changkyun reads his mind perfectly and sinks back onto the leather couch with Kihyun easily settling on top. 

Everything echoes with the time they’ve shared already; Kihyun can’t help but remember their last day on their trip to Los Angeles, the way Changkyun fucked him in the Château Marmont, looking out over the Hollywood Hills. Kihyun had had his eyes open the whole time, but now heights make him queasy, so he looks at Changkyun instead, licks along his throat to make him shiver, deftly undoes the buttons of his shirt — jeans with a button-down, what the _fuck _is his problem — and slides his hands over his smooth, firm chest. “Did you miss me?” he murmurs.

Changkyun is eager to nod, gripping at his favorite hold, Kihyun’s waist. “I’m so happy you’re here,” he breathes. “I was just wondering if you’d really come.”

“I told you I would, didn’t I? Don’t underestimate me next time,” Kihyun says, his fingers curled tight around Changkyun’s nape to keep him from moving around too much. 

“Never,” Changkyun sighs, blissful, and Kihyun knows how highly Changkyun must hope for him, how extravagant and impractical his daydreams must be, but somehow, he contents himself with this, with Kihyun dropping in on him unannounced for a little debauchery and doubtless leaving directly afterwards. “Mm— did you miss me, too?”

The question catches Kihyun by surprise. He’d just been opening up the last few buttons of his shirt, reveling in the warmth of his skin, kissing under his jaw, and Changkyun hasn’t said anything like that for a while, probably not since Kihyun first started to set up his patterns of bad behavior. Something from the distant past stirs, attempts to answer _how could I help but miss you, _but Kihyun himself says, “I was just in the area.”

Somehow, that’s still what Changkyun wanted to hear, and he sighs again as Kihyun keeps touching him, one of his big hands moving to stroke through Kihyun’s hair. What does he think he’s doing? What gives him the right? Kihyun lifts his shoulder to push Changkyun’s hand away, and Changkyun doesn’t resist, obediently stops his touches, and curls his fingers around Kihyun’s upper arm instead. “Well, either way,” Changkyun says, “I’m glad to have you.”

“I can tell,” Kihyun says, settles more firmly in Changkyun’s lap so he can push against his stiffening cock. “Who’s having whom, exactly?”

Which makes Changkyun laugh and then shut up, too busy moaning to make attempts at witty repartee, and Kihyun grinds down on him again, once again thrilled by the knowledge that he’s the one in true control of everyone out there, the hands pulling the marionette’s strings, but— for some reason, it’s less thrilling than such a prospect would usually be. Kihyun needs to be doing much less thinking, he decides, and lets Changkyun kiss his neck and rub over him through his tight YSL pants to get him fully hard. 

Should they be doing this in Changkyun’s office? It’s a miracle they haven’t done it before, honestly. This leather couch is practically a porn set upgrade, and Kihyun can’t help but wonder if Changkyun has ever brought any hook-ups here in a misguided, futile attempt to impress them. He very nearly asks, but he knows that no matter what answer Changkyun gives, it’ll only serve to incense Kihyun further, and besides, Changkyun is making it difficult to think, so pliant and easily moved under Kihyun’s touches. His recent physical changes, those continued twice-weekly sessions with Max fucking Myles, have given Kihyun the illusion, on occasion, of equality between them, but here the difference in power levels could not possibly be more clear, the way Changkyun is so eager for Kihyun to push him to lie down, how he moans around Kihyun’s fingers in his mouth when Kihyun presses two against his lips, telling him to get them wet, and although Kihyun is completely uninterested in actual public play, in actual exhibitionism, something dark and smug deep inside him is tempted to go and open up the blinds so the employees of the company Changkyun inherited can see just how much they ought to respect their boss. But the light in here, diffuse despite the walls of glass, is forgiving to the planes of Changkyun’s face, and Kihyun wants to waste no time, fingers him just for a minute or two, less indulgent than they normally are, far more practical, no tenderness anywhere to speak of as Kihyun pushes Changkyun’s legs up — he’s still as startlingly flexible as he’s ever been — and pushes inside him, covering Changkyun’s hungry gasp by shoving his fingers in his mouth again, which is a new trend, something Changkyun really likes but is really too shy to ask for, even with as shameless as he has been of late. 

“You should see yourself,” Kihyun murmurs into his ear, hips thrusting into him deep and even and slower than Changkyun would probably like. “You can’t imagine how you look.”

Changkyun’s tongue works, for a moment, against Kihyun’s fingers, and Kihyun draws them out to let him speak, rubs the slick pads of his pointer and middle against Changkyun’s impractically plush lower lip. He’s going to get in trouble, someday, with a mouth like that. Wasn’t Changkyun going to say something? The way Kihyun is fucking him, Changkyun’s left leg tossed up over his shoulder, his trousers haphazardly pulled off but only down to one ankle, is making it difficult for both of them to hold onto thoughts, but Changkyun is trying, so Kihyun gives him the grace of time, sucks an unambiguous mark unambiguously high above his collar, no chance of concealment even if Changkyun had wanted to, while Changkyun gathers his words. “What—” Kihyun loves it when his voice sounds like this, when he can’t finish a sentence for his low, throaty moans— “what do I look like?”

“You can’t even imagine it,” Kihyun breathes again, but pulls back to see him, eyes dragging over, so he can paint Changkyun a picture. It’s no use, there’s no words left to describe him, the way Changkyun looks when Kihyun is fucking him, especially here, especially now. His bruised, wet lips, his shining eyes so starving, the way his head falls back and his throat pulls down with each swallowed, stolen breath. Every one of Kihyun’s limbs aches just from looking at him, but he’s not just looking, he’s inside him, touching him everywhere he can, and Changkyun blossoms under his attentive eye, practically preening for him, and Kihyun leans in half an inch, barely enough to bring him into Changkyun’s airspace, and Changkyun’s mouth trembles with anticipation and he makes a small, needy noise, but Kihyun doesn’t kiss him. He just wanted to see what he’d do. He smiles, and Changkyun realizes he’s been denied and whines plaintively, but it’s no use. Kihyun won’t cave, he likes making him squirm too much. 

Not that Changkyun can really squirm in this position. Kihyun has him fairly closely pinned to the couch, and were he to loosen one of his hands from its tight grip on Kihyun’s forearms and grasp at the surface of the cushions below him instead, he still wouldn’t find purchase, the leather too soft and buttery to hold him with any kind of confidence. Kihyun had meant that he looks obscene, like a fucktoy, like a whore, like an illustration in a book that would be pulled from shelves and burned, but that intention had gotten lost along the way, and inadvertently, he’s ended up very nearly complimenting him by implying he’s _indescribable. _His heaving chest and grasping fingers. His eyelids, heavy, struggling to stay up to keep him from missing even a second of Kihyun’s expression. Unless Kihyun blindfolds him — something that they tried once, with limited success — he’ll keep his eyes as open as he can the entire time, even if tears gather on his lower lashline, even when he comes. So annoying. Kihyun never returns the favor, preferring to press his face into Changkyun’s neck or let his eyes naturally slide shut, but even then he can feel Changkyun’s burning gaze. 

Changkyun comes first without much incident, his body tensing up and his muffled little whimpers growing increasingly frantic against Kihyun’s collar. He’s happy, he’s practically glowing, he can’t keep the breathless smile off his face as Kihyun finishes, too, even though by then he’s pulled out to jerk himself off across the smooth spread of his skin. Kihyun can’t bring up any irritation when he’s in the throes of orgasm, but once that’s done, once Changkyun is curled up with his head on Kihyun’s shoulder and their legs are tangled and Changkyun is slowly dragging his fingertips through the come on his stomach — “Don’t,” Kihyun says sternly, and Changkyun just grins at him, sated and content, and doesn’t stop — the irritation is still refusing to make itself known, leaving Kihyun with nothing but the power from before. 

_Nothing but? _That’s such an intense understatement that Kihyun is very nearly offended at his own thoughts. It’s a hell of a thing, this much power, so why shouldn’t he bask in it? He allows himself to relax, stretch his legs, accept the small embroidered cloth Changkyun gives him to clean up with, and scans his eyes contentedly over Changkyun’s well-ravished frame, his mussed hair, kiss-swollen mouth, that hickey like a brand upon his neck. “Go get me some ice water,” Kihyun commands lazily.

Changkyun beams at him, a little sleepy, extremely happy, and starts to stretch for the small end table by the couch, where a landline phone with a blinking intercom awaits. To buzz his secretary, presumably, but Kihyun cuts him off with a tense shake of his head.

“No,” he says, and waits for Changkyun to turn and look at him with those drowsy, happy, confused eyes. “You.”

It takes Changkyun another moment or two to understand, but once it hits him, his happiness doesn’t abate even for an instant; if anything, it increases. He does always enjoy running mindless errands for Kihyun, like a distant reference to the way he used to dote on Kihyun in the past, when Kihyun still let him. He detaches himself from Kihyun fully, albeit reluctantly, fixes up his trousers and re-buttons his shirt, doesn’t bother with his hair, they both know it’s a lost cause, and leans down to kiss Kihyun on the cheek before stumbling to the door, his hips slanted at an awkward angle. “Be right back,” he promises, blowing Kihyun another kiss, then, dopey and smiling to himself, he exits and closes the door behind him.

Kihyun rolls his eyes and makes himself comfortable, leaning back against the couch and tilting his head back, back, to see the city upside down. The room now smells like sex, but he’s sure Changkyun won’t mind. He’ll probably love it, actually, since it’ll be like a tangible, if impermanent, reminder that Kihyun was really here. God, Kihyun still feels so good. Changkyun’s not much use except for when it comes to his money and a quick, dirty lay, but— all the blood is rushing to Kihyun’s head and he sits normally again, blinking dazzled eyes around the office itself, making his vision focus on the decorations, the design. It has a similar atmosphere to Changkyun’s old apartment, the Soho bachelor pad, and Kihyun doesn’t know how he’d never noticed that before, the one time he was here. All the bric-à-brac, the abstract art print which is most definitely an original, even the color of the carpet. Maybe Kihyun hadn’t noticed any of this before because it didn’t look like this before, because Changkyun barely spent any time at work. Maybe he’s only decorated it in the past few months, due to Kihyun’s insistence on him putting in his hours at the office, and his presence simply bled into the room, infecting everything it touched until each flat surface had at least one curio atop it, the formerly austere blinds had been replaced by gauzy curtains, and even the landline phone he’d been about to use to contact his secretary had a sticker with the name of some Brooklyn brewery plastered across the handset. Tacky as ever. But at least he’s consistent, a quality Kihyun would admire in anyone else.

Mildly dazed after coming, Kihyun loses track of time, just sitting on Changkyun’s leather couch and surveying his surroundings, but it’s either two minutes or five until Changkyun comes back into the room with a glass of ice water. He no longer looks happy, and he doesn’t close the door behind him, which is a bad sign. Kihyun raises his eyebrows, but Changkyun, shell-shocked and frowning, doesn’t say anything, so Kihyun sighs and takes the bait for him: “Took you long enough.”

“Did you—” Changkyun starts, then stops, as though he himself can’t believe what he’s about to say. He turns back to the door for a moment, his free hand pointing thumb-first out at the office, then looks at Kihyun. “Did you _fire_ Julie Wharton and Hugo Chen?”

“Oh, that,” Kihyun says. That’s all he’s upset about? He feels a sharp flare of annoyance that Changkyun is questioning his actions, because of course Kihyun will never tell why, exactly, he did what he did, for fear of Changkyun misinterpreting Kihyun’s self-interest for some kind of defense, loyalty, maybe even love. So he affects cool arrogance instead, lifting a careless shoulder, stretching out one hand for the ice water, which Changkyun, though distressed, gives over. “I guess I did.”

“Why,” Changkyun says. Upset again, a side of him Kihyun has been seeing more and more recently. Kihyun is no longer welcome here, that much is obvious, so once he takes a sip of the ice water he didn’t really want or need, he begins to stand, buttoning up his blazer around his shirt and maintaining his air of disaffected calmness. “They were— they’ve both been here for a long time, Hugo was meant to be presenting to the scientific board today, we were thinking of promoting Julie soon— why did you do that?”

“You’ll thank me later,” Kihyun says, sick of this game. “Now if you’ll excuse me—” He makes to leave, but Changkyun is still in the doorway, and Kihyun meets his gaze head-on, unashamed, unafraid. What reason has he for shame or fear? Sure, he shouldn’t have fired them, but not for the reasons Changkyun is whining about; no, he shouldn’t have fired them in Changkyun’s defense because Changkyun clearly doesn’t deserve to be defended. He’s just standing there, hurt and adrift, not quite blocking Kihyun’s path but not quite letting him leave, either, and Kihyun huffs impatiently and, tone flat, says, “What?” 

Like a challenge, like a last-ditch attempt to give Changkyun the chance to turn this into just another meaningless battle in the Cold War of their marriage, but Changkyun just swallows, shakes his head, and there’s something in his eyes that seems scared. “Sometimes when you look at me,” he says softly, “I just— I truly can’t even imagine what you’re thinking.”

_You and me both, baby. _

But out loud, Kihyun says, “I’ll look at you less, then,” and leaves, just like that. 

_MONTH 26_

At the very beginning, before everything got so fucking complicated, Kihyun had envisioned a scene from his life like a scene from a movie — Changkyun months-dead, and Kihyun under investigation, naturally, but his tracks are covered, not even circumstantial evidence remains, and once the police have finished asking all their questions, he is no longer a suspect. Only one detective, a manic conspiracy theorist on the brink of disgrace, sees Kihyun for what he’s done, and Kihyun, safe with the knowledge that there’s nothing this man could do, no way he could pin the crime on him, permits himself one moment of villainous conversation. The detective would ask, eyes haggard, hands shaking from needing a drink, “How do you sleep at night?” And Kihyun would shrug, so elegant, and answer, “On sheets worth more than your monthly salary.” Why should his sleep be disturbed, after the fact? He pictured Changkyun dead as soon as he saw him alive. It’s not an unfamiliar image to him, even imagined. There was to be no emotional attachment, no concern for anyone other than himself, so in truth, no aspects of Kihyun’s life were to change after the murder, if only for the better. A peaceful, quiet, liberated existence. No pretense or self-debasement for Changkyun’s sake. Finally, they both could rest.

Maybe everything was going too well. Maybe everything was predicated on Kihyun actually being able to kill him, in fact. Changkyun had fallen in love too quickly— he’d proposed too quickly, he’d opened his heart too quickly, it was never going to work. These are the thoughts that now keep Kihyun up at night; what was the exact reason that caused this foolproof plan not to work? He can’t sleep. Three nights, now, of lying by Changkyun’s breathing body and all but covering his ears to maintain some kind of fragile silence. Insomnia, what an ugly word. Kihyun did always prefer Greek to Latin. And now he and Changkyun are both tired all the time, Kihyun openly confrontational and Changkyun visibly on the bare edge of crankiness, but even when he gets home from work on any given day, having consistently stayed late to deal with the fallout of what Kihyun did, he’s _still _infuriatingly calm. He doesn’t even bring it up. Sometimes Kihyun wishes Changkyun would just snap— he’s sure that he wants to, that he needs to, and wouldn’t it be good for both of them for Changkyun to let it all out, all his pain and frustration and all the other emotions he pretends he doesn’t feel— because he must be pretending, he must be, there’s no way that a man could endure all that Kihyun forces him to and not feel _anything._

How trite, to be insomniac. It could be the fault of the bed, so Kihyun has the mattress changed while Changkyun’s away at the office. No improvement. The most he can manage is three hours a night, maybe thirty minutes during the day, dozing on a downstairs couch like a college kid or terminally ill housewife. Why is Changkyun never mad at him? In the doorway of his office, that was the closest Kihyun has ever seen him to it. Why isn’t he mad? Why does he still love Kihyun, even after all of this? Kihyun has tried and tried and tried to get him to stop, but Changkyun is stubborn, stronger than ever expected, and now Kihyun can’t sleep. 

At least now he has more free time than ever before, though he’s not quite sure how best to use it. Changkyun is equally melancholy if Kihyun comes to bed late as he is if he stays there for a while, then slips away to read downstairs, let alone if Kihyun forces himself to remain in bed unslumbering and motionless all night long, so his reaction is hardly a deciding factor. This would be a good time, Kihyun thinks, to pick up a hobby of some sort. But what could it possibly be, something quiet and solitary— knitting? Writing an advice column? All he would tell the letter-writers would be: _leave him, you’ve let it all go on too long. _He has no interest in cooking, and no TV shows these days have high enough stakes to capture his attention, and this has got to be some kind of karmic punishment, keeping him trapped in purgatory as retribution for the way he’s kept Changkyun on tenterhooks. 

Soon he’ll start hallucinating, he’s sure. He hopes he wastes away before then, but he knows he’s being dramatic — three, four hours a night is better than zero. His interest in coming to Manhattan for daily shopping sprees has diminished drastically, and that feeling of a countdown has only intensified, with him still absolutely clueless as to what he could possibly be expecting. Unwilling to begin the doubtless laborious process of unpacking all the books, he orders duplicates of his favorites on Amazon and spends his days inhabiting various spare rooms, restless in each one, with tomes of Wharton and Chaucer and Auden, and that whiles away the days for now. Somehow when he was in college, he didn’t understand the despair at the heart of _Jane Eyre, _or if he did, it was only on an analytical, cerebral level, but now it hits different notes in him, and he tries to switch from the classics to some modern bilge, the various James Pattersons and Danielle Steels of the world, but those, too, begin to bore him before long. So he switches to poetry, as devoid of plot as it is of any kind of point, and it works for a while, about a week or so, before he reads too much and starts to think in quatrains or free verse, his own thoughts tripping over themselves in their haste to turn a wilting iris in the back garden, visible from his spare room of choice, into something beautiful. It’s just a dying flower, and he goes outside with shears himself to clip it down. 

Changkyun is worried about him but won’t voice his concerns. That’s another thing Kihyun is trying to dare him into, and though he’s sure his efforts will be fruitless, it’s still worth a try. Why doesn’t he ask? Why does he stay? Yes, Kihyun’s name is on the deed, yes, Kihyun’s name is on the executive board, yes, Kihyun’s name is next to his on the tombstone, but even if he’s not going to leave, he could easily ask Kihyun to vacate the premises. Kihyun has always been a stranger in paradise to him, it doubtless wouldn’t take much to make him leave. But he won’t. He wants Kihyun to stay, even now.

If at first Kihyun couldn’t understand why Changkyun loved him so much, how and why the insipid simpering personality he’d crafted for Changkyun inspired such passion in him, now he doesn’t understand what aspect of what he is _now _forces Changkyun to stay. It can’t _just _be the sex— can it?— Kihyun cuts him off for a couple of days just to check, but no, Changkyun continues to be as tragically enamored as he’s been for all this time. Stubbornness, then, Changkyun’s innate inability to not see something through— but Kihyun has seen him recently abandon peeling a particularly reticent orange, barely halfway across the rind. No, he’s never minded quitting, if he can find a better option. Which— he hasn’t, has he? Kihyun tracks him as obsessively now as he’d done before they actually met, he’d know if there were someone comforting Changkyun through these trying times. Maybe Kihyun just finally has, deeply and truly, broken his spirit. And yet sometimes Changkyun murmurs under his breath in response to one of Kihyun’s off-handed barbs, then doesn’t repeat himself when prompted. Sometimes Kihyun, exhausted from trying in vain to sleep, turns his head and finds Changkyun awake as well and blinking drowsy eyes; he’d stayed up out of sympathetic solidarity, the first-time father who gains 50 pounds when his wife is pregnant. “Go to sleep,” Kihyun instructs him, displeased, and Changkyun only ever needs to be told anything once these days, so those inscrutably adoring eyes slide closed and he dares to turn towards Kihyun, and for once, Kihyun doesn’t move away, too tired to fight, too fucking tired to sleep.

He can’t think too closely about why Changkyun refuses to leave him — old outdated hopeless romantic ideas about marriage, maybe? — because then he’ll have to answer the questions he is too afraid to ask himself. He attempts to answer without asking: it is easier to maintain the lifestyle Kihyun has grown into with Changkyun here to advise, though Kihyun hardly ever solicits his opinion on anything at all. It’s more convenient to be around and have him near, too; something not unlike a butler, or a valet, or a servant. (The countdown in Kihyun’s head grows ever-louder.) The house is too big for just one person; it was bought specifically for two. (Louder, still, more urgent, and like a thread that when pulled unravels the whole sweater, like a hangnail that if toyed with tears off half the skin on the helpless hand, if Kihyun looks to find the source, follows the trail of breadcrumbs to the origin of these pressing numbers diminishing in his head, he doesn’t know what he may find.) It has nothing to do with loneliness, or friendship — something near to it, two survivors of a shipwreck marooned and forcibly tolerant of each other’s flaws — or— or the other thing. Kihyun is not a creature of change or of habit; he likes for things to be the way he wants, and that is all.

He practices it in the mirror, the way he used to practice his smiles, his response to Changkyun’s inevitable proposal. “I don’t love you. I never did.” He tries again, to make it more sincere: “I don’t love you. I never did. I married you to kill you for your money.” That must be what the countdown is for, and Changkyun can take it or leave it. Frankly, Kihyun doesn’t care about how he’ll react to the confession, and he doesn’t even think Changkyun deserves to hear it, but the countdown doesn’t stop, pounding in Kihyun’s head when he’s trying desperately to sleep, like the neighboring laundromat back in Chelsea used to, like the throbbing of a loose and rotting tooth, and Kihyun can rip it out, he can tear it out, he just has to reach his hands inside and pull.

Kihyun hadn’t realized how profoundly unhappy he’d been until that unhappiness is replaced equally abruptly with peace. The prospect of telling Changkyun gives him a certain saintlike calm, an existentialist advantage over his surroundings, he is back in control. The countdown sharpens. Changkyun continues to languish for want of marital affection— _how funny, _Kihyun marvels! In another week or so he’ll be repelled by the mere thought of Kihyun, though presumably they’ll still be cohabitating, he wouldn’t turn him out onto the street just like that. Will confessing staunch that putrid sense of guilt? Unfounded, unneeded, unnecessary, unwanted? As long as it assuages the countdown, Kihyun will be satisfied.

“What is that?” he asks sharply when Changkyun in his pajamas appears in the doorway with two mugs. The insomnia is not the problem, it’s a symptom of a disease Kihyun fears he may have had all his life, and he hates that Changkyun knows he hasn’t been sleeping but he kept guessing and asking and trying to help when nothing can help Kihyun, nothing, nothing, and Kihyun has told him as much but Changkyun still tries anyway.

“Chamomile,” Changkyun says and brings the mugs over. Kihyun watches him set the mug intended for Kihyun down on his nightstand, not even lifting his eyes to look Kihyun in the face. How well-trained he is, how docile. Kihyun feels a rush of pity and, once the cups are out of Changkyun’s hands, reaches for his hips to pull him to the bed. Startled, again a deer in Kihyun’s headlights as Kihyun floors the gas, he stumbles and is caught, then pushed to lie on his back with Kihyun hovering above. “To help you sleep,” he adds dumbly, and Kihyun despises the way Changkyun looks at him when he feels that he’s been wronged, so he moves a hand to brush Changkyun’s soft black hair away from his forehead, then smoothes his hand down his face, feeling his eyelids close like a body found bleeding on the driveway.

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead,” Kihyun says, humming, sing-songy, mocking, and under his careful hand, Changkyun’s face twitches. “I lift my lids and all is born again—”

“I think I made you up inside my head,” Changkyun finishes, a little hushed, a little hoarse.

Kihyun’s hand moves lower. Past his supple mouth, down over the always-tempting fragile throat. Undoes the top button of his pajama shirt— he’d had a matching set embroidered for them both to celebrate six months of marriage. His skin is always warm and his heart is beating hard. “The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, and arbitrary blackness gallops in,” Kihyun continues, bending to kiss Changkyun’s collarbone, his hand undoing further buttons.

Changkyun shivers and lies still, surrendering himself. But he’s quiet as Kihyun kisses down his chest, so Kihyun gives his hip a little pinch, and he colors pink and recites, obedient, “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.”

His eyes really are still closed. Kihyun slips his hand into his pajama bottoms and finds him hardening fast, no better combination than his mean and pretty husband in a playful mood and the classics of world literature. In another minute, he’s ready for use, and Kihyun divests himself of his robe to straddle him, sliding home, easier than anything to fit Changkyun inside, that’s always been the easy part. Changkyun’s tea-warmed hands move to take Kihyun by the waist, his breath labored, his eyelashes fluttering, and Kihyun, himself not unaffected, gives them both a minute to catch their breath before he rolls his hips, back to front and smooth, and says, “I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed—” He grinds on him again, and a smile is dawning on Changkyun’s lips and Kihyun leans down to kiss him, to taste it, to try and suck that happiness off his tongue— “and sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.”

“I think I made you up inside my head,” Changkyun completes, eager, smiling, it’s another game. Why doesn’t he see? Why doesn’t he know? This isn’t a love poem, it’s a grotesque, a cry for help, and Kihyun fucks himself on Changkyun’s cock faster, while he can.

“God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade,” Kihyun says, more dramatic, playing along, to feel the way Changkyun’s dick throbs with his laugh. “Exit— exit, fuck, um— seraphim and Satan’s men—”

His eyes opening even as they kiss, Changkyun choruses, breathless, “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.” He tries to kiss Kihyun more deeply and Kihyun lets him, wet, searching for something neither of them will find, not here, not now. When they’re like this, he can very nearly forget— very nearly imagine— another world, a simpler world, an easier world than this, where everything was always easy, where Changkyun still knows how to smile without covering his mouth, where Kihyun lets him in. Changkyun kisses him, and Kihyun turns his head away to gasp against the corner of his mouth, arms slipping down to wrap around his shoulders. Changkyun’s chest rattles with a breath and his chest vibrates with a low noise, the overture to speech, and before Kihyun can stop him, he rasps, “I fancied you’d return the way you said, but I grow old and I forget your name—”

Arousal cuts to panic in a heartbeat and the moan climbing up Kihyun’s throat comes out as a choked-off sob. “I think I dreamed you up inside my head,” he rushes, can’t breathe, this is no longer what it had been, a game of cat and mouse always seemed more fun for the cat but maybe it isn’t after all, and Changkyun must surely have figured it out by now, no one fucks like that who isn’t afraid they’re going to die tomorrow. Why would Changkyun fuck him like this if he doesn’t know? Like this is the last time, like he’s drowning, his hands shaking, he must be passing the time waiting for Kihyun to pull the trigger, there’s no way he doesn’t know, but of course Changkyun knows, he always knows, and his arms encircle Kihyun’s back more tightly and he fucks him deeper, harder, to push those thoughts away. But Kihyun has to finish, he has to finish what he started, and he keeps going, tongue fumbling over the words, graceless in their delivery just to get it over with as they both speed up— “I should have loved a thunderbird instead— at least, at least when spring— Changkyun, I can’t—”

“At least when spring comes they roar back again,” Changkyun’s voice in his ear, all around him, inside him, within him, never without him. “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I think I made you up—”

“Inside my head,” Kihyun breathes, and it’s with Changkyun’s hand on his face, thumb pressed tight underneath the artery alongside his cheekbone, that he comes. He can’t bear it for a second longer; he pants against Changkyun’s neck, Changkyun seconds from the brink, and pulls himself up and off, too fast and rough, he winces at the suddenness, and with Changkyun unsatisfied, supplicating, confused, he takes a mouthful of chamomile tea that burns his throat all the way down and locks himself in the bathroom and runs the bath boiling hot, staring at the swirls of water, only contented when his eyes begin to sting.

He stays in the bath until the water is cold. Changkyun hasn’t tried to enter. He must have finished himself off and gone to sleep, always in other news. Kihyun is shivering in the tepid water and he’d forgotten to turn on the bathroom light so it’s just him and the waning moon cutting in through the uncurtained windows. Kihyun is waning, too. And the countdown is up.

Just like that, Kihyun knows what to do. Sliding down so his chin and mouth sink below the water, seeking nonexistent inaccessible warmth, he knows what he has to do. He thinks he’s always known this was coming— couldn’t admit it, couldn’t put a name to the problem, couldn’t fix it, and now it’s too late. It’s too late. Star-crossed, cursed, damned, doomed. Alone, unseen, unloved, and yet in love himself, so in love he pushes fully under the water and submits himself and waits, but his lungs rebel, they push him gasping to the surface, and he is born anew into a world where the only man he’s ever loved is one Kihyun can never have.

He stares at his body in the water— at his hands— he wishes he were anything but this, anywhere but here, what god would forgive him, let alone what man? He climbs out of the bath, pulls on a robe so there’s no water on the floor to chill Changkyun’s feet in the morning, and goes into the closet to pack a bag.

He packs quickly and methodically, because he already knows what to bring. No need to waste time choosing. He takes not so much that the suitcase will be heavy, but enough that Changkyun will know he’s gone for good, and while he packs, Kihyun orders a cab from his phone and, just in case, takes his passport from the safe. But he has no plans to leave the country, that would be too easy to track. He buys a Greyhound bus ticket, one-way to Chicago, leaving in two hours. The rest of the clothes and things he wants to bring with him are in the other closet, so he carefully, quietly, opens the door and slips through the room — not even a glance at Changkyun in bed, he can’t, if he looks now he might lose his nerve — and into the hallway, suitcase carried noiselessly in hand, to get the last of his undershirts and his most versatile sweaters. He leaves all but one Hermès scarf; something to remember each other by. Checks the time; twenty minutes until the cab is due to arrive. There should be an ATM at the bus station, he thinks, he can drain as much cash as the machine will allow, then get the rest out somewhere in-between here and Chicago, he’ll be untrackable, unfindable. He dresses, plain and comfortable in anticipation of the overnight journey, and zips up the suitcase slowly so it makes no noise, though of course Changkyun is fast asleep, he won’t wake, he won’t stir, he won’t see Kihyun slipping out like the thief that he is, he won’t even miss him, and Kihyun takes the suitcase out of the closet and sets it at the top of the landing and waits, just for a moment, to see if the feeling will pass. It doesn’t. 

There is paper and a pen to be found in the next room and Kihyun uses his phone for illumination, writing swiftly and succinctly. Simpler to leave a note than to risk Changkyun misinterpreting the situation. The first two sentences come easy, and the third makes his hand shake when he writes it, bile in his throat, but he doesn’t want to scratch it out, he doesn’t want to crumple up the paper and start again, so he folds the page in two and reenters the bedroom and allows himself to look at Changkyun, but the room is dark, and if Kihyun wants to see his face, he’ll have to get closer.

He’s fast asleep. Kihyun takes one quiet measured step, then two, then three, until he no longer has to count, it’s clear Changkyun is at no risk of waking up. He always looks so young when asleep, because of course he is, so young, just a boy who asked for none of this, and Kihyun places the note on the other pillow so it’ll be the first thing he sees in the morning when he finds the bed half-empty. Against his better judgment, Lot’s wife, Orpheus, he looks at Changkyun’s sleeping body and has— has the wild urge to curl up against him, to cling to him, throw his arms around Changkyun’s waist and hold onto him, let Changkyun stir and kiss his hair, reflexive in his sleep, and, Christ, tell him that everything’s going to be okay. Instead, he dips a finger into the chamomile tea on the nightstand and finds it freezing. Is the note at an odd angle? Will Changkyun see it first thing? Kihyun reaches to adjust the position, but as he moves, so does Changkyun, snuffling a quiet breath into his pillow, and Kihyun goes motionless but Changkyun was just getting cozier and cozier, all bundled up in the sheets, and he really won’t notice the absence. It’s better this way. It’s better for everyone this way. _Changkyun, _says the note. _I would rather it be your fault that you’re still alive than my fault that you’re not. Please don’t come looking. I love you. _Unsigned, naturally. Fuck.

And that’s it. He goes out of the room and takes his bag and goes down the stairs, unhooking his house keys from his car keys, leaving the latter and taking the former, though he’ll hardly have use for them from this point forth. The taxi is idling outside, and Kihyun has no reason to look back, so he doesn’t. He locks the door behind himself and instinctively glances to the security camera above the driveway, there, that’s something interesting for Changkyun to see if he ever reviews the tapes. The driver helps him with his bag and Kihyun doesn’t say a word. The bus is in an hour and a half. As the car pulls away from the curb and onto the street, Kihyun still doesn’t look back, but when he suddenly wonders if he’d remembered to turn off the lights illuminating the front garden and twists in the back seat to see, the house has faded completely from view.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/paratazxis) (+ tip jar link therein, if interested) (and feel free to use #FoolproofAO3), [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/paratazxis), [official playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/12MLmAfM9PhFB63N7EWMww?si=yQVn9E5ZR_-1vJVLkdfFFg), [More Fun playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4uy2Cl1pvB2ebqD4mUEJ75?si=26jS0Ry5SmyqOP3TqGegmQ) (ps, the poem changki recite in the last scene is mad girl's love song by sylvia plath! shoutout to sylvia.)
> 
> due to overwhelming public demand i will now be updating **every week, **so chapter 8 will be posted on **april 17. ** subscribe for immediate email updates!!!! dont forget this fic is tagged as happy ending i promise :+) thank you so much for reading, and i'd really love to hear what you think in the comments or at any of the links below!!! mwah mwah ... stab stab


	8. Months 27-32

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lost and found throughout America.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: suicidal ideation

_MONTHS 27-29_

He bought a ticket for Chicago, but spending the past two years in the lap of luxury rendered him unable to read a simple bus schedule, so instead he ends up in Jacksonville, Florida, and by the time he’d realized the mistake it was too late to turn back. It’s a disgusting place. Normally Kihyun wouldn’t be caught dead in fucking Florida, but once he’s gotten off the phone with Greyhound customer service after yelling at three different managers, he checks himself into a Best Western and hunkers down, knowing that Changkyun would never look for him here, he may as well stay, even if for a little while, until whatever maelstrom is doubtless tearing through New York blows over. He pulls out cash, bit by bit, from his bank account, all location-tracking features on his phone turned off completely, and doesn’t check the news. 

Amy Dunne née Elliott would be disappointed in him; he really hadn’t planned his exit through. At least he’d taken the step, months ago, of locking Changkyun out of his personal checking account, making sure he wouldn’t even be able to call the bank to verify recent purchases. Still safer to stick with cash, though, so much more difficult to track just in case Changkyun manages to circumvent security, and yes, Kihyun had left impulsively, thoughtlessly, without adequate preparation, and it would be easy for Changkyun to find him, if he wanted to. There isn’t a single door that his money can’t open. But a month passes, and nobody comes looking. 

At first, it’s strange to be without him. They spent nearly every day together for 26 excruciating months, and Kihyun is used to his running commentary, to his breathing, to the press of him against his shoulder when they walk. Of course he was an annoying presence more often than not, but returning to the solitude that Kihyun called home his whole life before Changkyun is very strange indeed. Is it better this way? Certain recent revelations have made it difficult for him to give a confident answer that yes, it is, but that won’t stop him from trying. Sometimes Kihyun turns, instinctively, to him, and finds him not there, or rather himself too far away. Better this way. _Better this way._ He says it to himself over and over and over, and only believes it for Changkyun’s sake. 

_I don’t miss him, _Kihyun thinks when he wakes up. _I don’t miss him, _when he’s checking his cosmetics bag for the third time that day, obsessive, to make sure his wedding band is still within. _I don’t miss him, _sending housekeeping away after only allowing them to bring new sheets and towels, not even enter the room. _I don’t miss him, _as he hides from the sun. _I don’t miss him, _like a heartbeat, stronger than a mantra, and he’d thought he’d gotten good at crafting lies so convincing he believed every word, but this one just won’t stick.

What was the point of it all? He had what he wanted, but he just couldn’t have left well enough alone. Now he’s in self-imposed exile in fucking _J-ville_. The slogan of the city, crafted by some idiot jerk-off numbskull employed by the local government, is the sickening _It’s easier here, _and each time Kihyun sees it on a brochure or billboard, it makes him want to tear his hair out. What is easier? Better this way; easier here. Kihyun doesn’t miss Changkyun. He may as well find another vulnerable millionaire to prey on, try his luck somewhere else, more favorable waters, plenty of fish in the sea for a predatory seabird like himself, and he tells himself he’ll research later, he’ll get around to it later, things are fine like this for now. He hardly ever leaves his room except to eat. He sees no one and talks to no one. Any calls — few and far between though they are, which in itself is odd, Kihyun expected Changkyun to go running straight to Minhyuk or Wonho or even Hyungwon to ask them to contact Kihyun and bring him back, but even Minhyuk barely texts him, sends him the occasional picture of a coffee shop chalkboard with a funny inscription or a jacket he’s considering buying, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing more — go unanswered. 

Life as a married millionaire had been dull enough. All those trips back and forth to Manhattan, designer shopping, thousand-dollar lunches in perfect solitude. Life as whatever he is now, some kind of wealthy hermit in a taupe-and-olive hotel room in the stickiest place on Earth, is even worse. Solitary confinement as a sentence never seemed so bad to him until now, even though he is his own jailer, his own roommate from hell, being alone with his thoughts is the worst kind of punishment, although he supposes it fits the crime. Two months go by, and although he’s not expecting any kind of knight in shining armor to come and take him down from his tower, he’d take a cop, at least, or an FBI investigator. Even a volunteer from an organization that searches for missing persons. He ventures outside, at least, so he doesn’t get rickets from lack of Vitamin D, then promptly gets a sunburn and decides never to try that again.

Florida is the wrong place for him. He’s staying as some kind of penance, thinking maybe if he’s as uncomfortable as he can possibly be that it will make karmic amends to the universe, but it’s not the universe to whom he owes an apology. He doesn’t miss Changkyun — but the absence of him, of everything Kihyun has grown accustomed to, gets more painful with each day, everything he has now reminds him of what he fought so hard to earn and subsequently give up. Every surface here is covered in a fine and treacly layer of crusted salt water, even his hair loses its luster, his clothes crinkle to the touch, despite the fact that he keeps his windows firmly closed. He longs for the simplest things, the things he’d never noticed before, had taken so for granted— the smell in the hallways of the Ritz, sandalwood and lavender and rose, a bathroom faucet of an interesting shape, waiters moving noiselessly like shadows to offer Kihyun a refill before he’d even had the chance to think that he could use one. Soft sheets, as the ones here keep irritating his skin. Decent coffee. Waking up and not being alone. He doesn’t miss him, so instead he counts and counts and counts the cash he’d taken out of his bank account so far, checks the ring again, doesn’t check his phone. 

He books a bus to take him to Chicago, at last. Jacksonville was bad enough in June and July, he has no desire to stay through August. But he won’t be in Chicago long, the skyscrapers and the rattling trains turn his stomach, the bitter wind cutting through him from the lake even in summer feels correct but that’s the only thing, everything else is too similar, too similar to his life before, and he can’t stand the sight of a city moving and living and breathing without Changkyun in it. Undead though he may be, the ghost of him is everywhere, haunting Kihyun no matter how he tries to escape, and in Jacksonville, the problem — he thinks — must have been the isolation, that he was too much on his own with his thoughts, so he surrounds himself with people, goes to coffee shops and spends his money, goes to bars and spends his money, but if someone is kind to him he leaves immediately. It’s the wrong kind of kindness; it’s coming from the wrong source. Either way, he doesn’t deserve it, but he’s not interested in self-flagellation. He takes up smoking again and quits, sourly, in another two weeks. He likes the nicotine withdrawal better than the addiction itself. The closest he’s come to feeling something since he left. Changkyun saw the note, right? He read it, he must have understood it, surely. And now he hates Kihyun, he’s afraid of him, he never wants to see him again, and Kihyun’s insomnia has gone away, now he can’t sleep enough, but even though before their marriage his dreams had been the last Changkyun-free frontier, now he sees him nightly, all he does is dream of him and wake up in a cold sweat, reaching out for a body that will never be there. 

When Kihyun looks back on it, it’s easy at first to write it off as simple familiarity. He got used to him, to pretending to love him, to fawning over him and laughing at his jokes and kissing him constantly and always being joined at the hip. It’s a simple trick of psychology, a habituation, no real sentiment, no real affection. He trained himself into it, now he can train himself out. But then— but then he remembers the times _after, _those days when he’d barely look at Changkyun for weeks on end, no soft kisses, no warm embraces, no praise and tenderness and holding of hands and treating him like the loveliest star in the evening sky, he still had this same ache in his chest, still that same pull to be close to him, and now he’s no better off than when he started. Love is not meant for him. He was never meant for love. This is proof of that, and nothing more. 

He’s out of Chicago in another week. Maybe he’ll try California, but even as he thinks that, he knows he won’t. One memory too many was made there, and Kihyun has a heart like a Swiss watch, right on time it’ll beat and break down his machinery if he’s within 700 miles of the spot where Changkyun first told him that he loved him. Maybe — maybe the fault is not with him (although of course it is), maybe it’s that love was never real at all, since it was so easy for Changkyun to fall into it and for Kihyun to pretend so convincingly that he clearly fooled himself, and it’s not _love, _this unthought known, he’d always believed that he himself was the monster underneath his own bed but it was _this _all along, this feeling, so foreign and so painful, not quite love, not quite guilt or regret or longing or yearning or loneliness so terrible it burns him to look into the core of it, but he supposes if he had to choose a word, love would be most apt. He leaves Chicago. Spends a week at a bed and breakfast in Louisville, then decides he much prefers this kind of city to anything so close to New York and gets a room in an actual hotel. There is a bridge where he likes to go walking at night, but he shouldn’t allow himself to like anything, he won’t allow himself to get attached, so after the first few passes over it, pretending he’d be able to get up the nerve to jump even though it’s not even tall enough anyway, he spends his evenings at the hotel instead.

It turns out he can open a checking account at Wells Fargo without proof of address. He does so, but only after voiding as many ATMs in town of cash as he possibly can. Ever-paranoid of Changkyun being able to get through his hastily lain defenses and find him, but he knows he won’t stay in Louisville long, either, his goal is to be on the move. A rolling stone gathers no remorse. He would have preferred to open an account online, less human interaction, but his tastes have been skewing more and more analog of late, less easy to track pen and paper, brick and mortar, than digital data, so he takes another bus (remembers how to read a schedule, now, he wonders what else he’ll remember how to do once enough time has passed) to their office and the young woman behind the desk, smiling and patient as Kihyun, gaunt and overslept and scarcely human, fumbles for his driver’s license, says, “So what brings you to Louisville?”

She pronounces it correctly, but if anything, the drawl needles at Kihyun far worse than if she’d said it wrong, and he hates small talk anyway, so he says, far sharper than intended, “That’s a very personal question.”

Which shuts her down fast. She apologizes politely and looks at her computer instead, typing his information with manicured fingers, the exact shade of lilac that Changkyun said was his favorite color, and Kihyun blinks very hard and swallows down the venom rising in his throat, his pride, what he once was. “I’m sorry,” he says, carefully. “I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. I’m here for— for a fresh start.”

“Well, you came to the right place,” she says with a smile, not looking away from her computer screen, but Kihyun can tell he closed the door before it could even be opened, she’s done trying to be nice to him. He doesn’t need much more from her, she’s almost done making his account, but all of a sudden he is seized with the desperate need to be this woman’s friend, to have her like him or at the very least tolerate him, to forgive him, truly forgive him, for what he said. He will never see her again after this, but he almost wants to, he wants to know her life story, her trials and tribulations, her secret heart’s desires, her opinion of him, whether she thinks he has any hope. He voices none of this, just rubs his thumb against the negative space on his left fourth finger, and leans forward in his chair, at an inviting distance, friendly.

“I love your nails,” he attempts, and she glances down at her hands and says oh, thanks, and then she tells him that he’ll receive his new bank card at the mailing address provided within seven to ten business days and wishes him a good day. 

He’ll consider it a lesson learned, of a sort. If he wants to make friends, he’ll catch as few flies with honey as with vinegar, but he has no use at all for flies. Stupid even for trying, really, to befriend a mere bank teller, to befriend anyone, and so he resumes his previous isolated existence, his messenger bag stuffed full of cash, doesn’t even order himself delivery anymore, instead prefers to go to the grocery store fifteen minutes before it closes and get something he can microwave. Vitamin supplements to replace whatever else his diet is missing, but for the hole punched through him just behind his sternum, there’s no simple one-to-one replacement, so he watches shitty daytime TV, soap operas and infomercials and Judge Judy, as the days blur together and the nights blur together and his life blurs together and he’s sure, quite sure, that nobody is going to come looking for him. Changkyun is not going to come looking for him. Obedient to the last; Kihyun trained him a little bit too well.

Afraid to do a direct transfer from his old account to his new one regardless, he contents himself with the money he’s gotten out so far, somewhere in the range of $50,000 due to Bank of America’s stupid $700-daily limit. He thinks maybe he could get a job, something freelance and remote so he can maintain his newly nomadic lifestyle, and he can’t cut up his old card, it’s made of metal, but he wants to do something to it, something permanent and lasting, so he goes out to that bridge, the one he still likes despite himself, when it’s past the sunset and nobody else is there, to sear the numbers and his name off with a lighter and watch as the metal warps and shrivels. He lets it fall from his fingers into the tidy reeds and grasses below, catching the light for one more final moment before it’s lost. He could follow— but he won’t, and he turns and walks back to the hotel and falls asleep and dreams of chasing Changkyun through an increasingly elaborate maze, and wakes with Changkyun’s laughter ringing in his ears.

(He has other dreams about Changkyun, too. Sometimes even when he’s awake. Missing his body is part of missing the whole of him, but it’s simpler than most things to acknowledge and admit to himself that he misses his careful, reverent hands, the needy pressure of his tongue, the arch and ache of his body against Kihyun’s. The way he breathed, during. The way he looked, after. The sex was always the easiest part, Kihyun had had to fake it the least— in truth, he’d never faked it at all. He takes a lot of cold showers, feeling unclean for thinking about Changkyun that way after what he’s done to him, but the thoughts persist, he can’t stop them, just as much as he can’t stop the other ones, helpless against the tide.)

Unwillingly, he settles into a routine. Breakfast at the hotel: corn flakes and black coffee. Back to his room for a couple of hours of television and sorting through his laundry and resolutely ignoring the outside world. A suitably ascetic lunch at a suitably miserable diner with his messenger bag in the other side of the booth, which is good company, at least. It doesn’t talk or gaze at him reproachfully. After that, back to the hotel until nightfall, and once the sun is down, he walks through the dusk half-hoping someone will talk to him, invite him somewhere that ends up to be a trap. The waiters at the diner are good, they don’t recognize him even though he’s come every day for the past five days, whiling the time away until he gets his new card mailed to the hotel and can leave again. He can handle a routine, if it’s impermanent. After this, he’ll stay on the move, the ends will justify the means, the ends being nobody ever hearing from him again, the means being his current miserable existence. And it’s a nice enough place to spend this stage of his purgatory, the weather not too openly hostile, the people generically, impersonally cordial. The days and nights continue to mesh together. Has it really been three months since he left? Coming up on it. Changkyun was supposed to have been dead for almost a year by now. And instead he’ll live a happy and healthy life and die of natural causes at 98 surrounded by reporters and other pretenders, other claimants to his inheritance, who learned how to really play the long game, who succeeded where Kihyun failed, who got to be with him until the bitter end. 

And as quickly as Kihyun had settled into the routine, he is snapped out of it; he comes on a Saturday and the diner is stuffed full, uncharacteristically bursting at the seams, and the waitress seats him at the bar instead of at his usual booth. A temporary annoyance, enough to rankle at him and make him frown all through his club sandwich. His brain can’t quite keep up with the flicking of the switch between the habit and the new, and further insult is added when he is jostled by his neighbor at the bar, ungainly and smelling distantly of beer as he gets up to leave, and Kihyun’s tongue curls to snap at him but he can’t do even _that, _can’t find it in himself, the fight is gone. He drains the rest of his lemon water — small luxuries, even in a grainy plastic glass — and signals to the waitress for his check and pays it with the meager amount of cash he keeps in his wallet, and when he reaches down to take his messenger bag from the floor so he can go, he—

His hand meets a terrible absence that is tangible, and yet he cannot grasp it, because it is a void, a nothingness, the cold subway tile of the wall and the splintering wood of the bar stool and, lower down, the slightly grimy linoleum covering the floor. There is no bag. His bag is gone. Kihyun unthinking bolts out of his stool and runs for the door, shoving past a walking waiter and a newly-arrived family of four waiting for a table, but when he’s out on the street, the man he’s looking for is gone, his bag is gone, he could file a police report but what’s the fucking point, he wouldn’t be able to answer any of their questions as to where he got all that cash and why he needed it so badly, he nearly falls, the shock of the loss driving him to sudden and acute exhaustion, and supports himself against a ‘no parking’ sign. His breath is haggard and his eyesight has narrowed to golden pinpricks in a field of black, presyncope, and someone asks if he’s alright and he waves them away and fumbles with an addict’s shaking hands for his wallet in his breast pocket, always close to his heart, and counts what cash he has left. Not quite two hundred dollars — a hundred and eighty five, in fact. Changkyun’s money, that was Changkyun’s money, and some _asshole, _some waste of oxygen who reeked of cheap Corona and has no idea about what Kihyun did to get that money, what Kihyun put a good and honest man through to get that money, he just took it, probably has no idea what a windfall he’s carrying around on his worthless shoulder right now, Kihyun definitely doesn’t deserve it but that motherfucker deserves it so much less, and Kihyun folds his wallet back up and stows it back inside his pocket and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes and breathes, and breathes, and breathes. 

Back at the hotel, he rips up mattresses and pillows, couch cushions and carpet corners, thinking maybe he’d forgotten something, maybe he’d overlooked it, maybe he’d squirrelled more away somewhere in a fugue state and not left himself any clues. He finds nothing and collapses at the foot of the bed, his head in his hands, fingers knotted in his hair tight enough to tear it all out at the root. One hundred and eighty five dollars is barely enough to cover the hotel room for the rest of the week, though he’d prepaid until— until Monday, he thinks, but after that, what happens after that? His new card was supposed to come the day before yesterday but it didn’t, and now he’ll have to count the rest of the business days, seven to ten she’d said, and they won’t let him stay a night he hasn’t paid for, and he won’t sleep on the street, he won’t, he won’t.

He has nothing he could sell — the wedding band is platinum — he has nothing he could sell. He’d brought none of his best designer pieces with him, and even if he could hawk the scarf on eBay, that would still take time, he would still need a place to stay until the listing is approved, where’s he going to go, a homeless shelter? God, he wishes Changkyun were here, but the thought makes him laugh as soon as he’s had it— it’s not like Changkyun would know what to do, either. Poor little rich boys, both of them. He falls onto his back on the bed and stares at the mottled, water-stained hotel room ceiling. Reaches out his hand and flexes his fingers. Finds his phone, eventually. There is nothing to be done. The phone rings and is answered, eagerly, like he was waiting all day long for this exact call to come in, and as Kihyun begins to tell him, tonelessly, the situation, he doesn’t cry, but damn, if it isn’t a near thing.

_MONTH 30_

“You look like shit,” Wonho says extremely kindly. Indeed, the kindest of three evils, that’s why Kihyun had picked him. To call Minhyuk would be to inadvertently confess the whole extent of it, Minhyuk has a way about him that makes Kihyun get honest, and that speech at Kihyun’s wedding— the quaver in his voice— Kihyun can’t let him down, not like this. Hyungwon is, of course, excommunicado. Fuck him. Kihyun would rather never speak to him again than prove him right. But Wonho, who had wept through the whole week in France, who had given Kihyun all those coy and knowing looks the first time Kihyun had brought Changkyun inextricably into the fold of his true life, Wonho would have treated _any _of them like that, had they suddenly developed a serious boyfriend, and Kihyun, comforted by the generic skew of Wonho’s easy sentiment, knew that the worst he would have to endure from coming to him for help would be pity. But not _real _pity, not the kind that makes Kihyun’s very soul ache with repulsion, not condescending pity or superior pity or helpful pity, no. The pity Wonho feels for him is Hallmark-approved, hot cocoa and breakup movies and going out for martinis to forget all about the son of a bitch, he didn’t deserve you anyway. Kihyun can handle that. It’s as fake as anything else. At least Wonho means well, a rarity in Kihyun’s world of falsehoods.

And he’s right about Kihyun’s appearance. It’s only been two days since Kihyun called him and told him, _I left Changkyun, and now I’m in Kentucky, but I got mugged and I have nothing, _but Kihyun does look like it’s been far, far longer, even though Wonho had so generously booked him a comfortable bus that took him from Louisville to Philadelphia, then another from Philadelphia to New Paltz, since Kihyun wouldn’t go through New York City itself, wouldn’t, couldn’t. It’s bad enough to be within 100 miles of Changkyun, he’s already tense and itchy and uncomfortable, to go directly through Manhattan— risk seeing him on every corner— it was unthinkable. No doubt contributing to his rock-bottom look, dark circles under his eyes, cheekbones sharper than ever before, skin tone sallow, gaze generally dead. Kihyun just lifts a shoulder, what can ya do, and takes a sip of his coffee, hands curled tightly around the mug. “It’s been a rough few months,” he says, the most he can muster.

Wonho barely shakes his head. “I can’t even imagine,” he says. It’s only been two days since Kihyun told him, _It’s not forever, I just need a place to lay low until I can figure something out, _and he hadn’t asked, not in so many words, and Wonho teary already on the phone, had said, _Of course you can stay with us, _but Wonho is acting like they’ve been in the trenches together forever, and if at first they were brothers in arms in love, now they’re brothers in arms in misery. What does he know about how Kihyun feels? He and his perfect handsome husband have never faced any obstacles, save for perhaps Kihyun and his friends being a little suspicious of how quickly things were moving, but clearly they’d been wrong, and now everything is perfect in Wonho’s world, it always has been perfect, Kihyun was a fool for thinking he could ever outdo him. But he knows Wonho doesn’t see him that way and this competition between Kihyun and the rest of the world is all in his head, so he just shrugs noncommittally again and lets Wonho reach across the table to press his hand in a tight, heartening squeeze. 

He can see that Wonho is bursting for more information, and he’s too tired to withhold it, so he sighs, sips his coffee, and says, “You can ask.”

“What _happened?” _Wonho asks immediately, not waiting even a second, and his big Disney princess eyes get even bigger, even shinier. “What— you were so happy! What did he do? Does he know you’re here? When did you, did you leave?”

“It’s not him,” Kihyun says, and the words make his throat feel raw but he has to say this, Wonho has to know this, before he lets him in to poison his home like a cancer spreading slowly through the body. “It wasn’t him. He didn’t do anything. It was me— I’m the bad guy here. So please don’t pity me, or comfort me, or even feel bad for me, because it’s— well, it’s all my fault.”

“It can’t be,” Wonho attempts, but even as he says it Kihyun can see the struggle behind those glossy eyes, whether to believe in what he perceives his friend to be or in what, in all honesty, his friend truly is. “Kihyun, nothing can ever really be _just _one person’s fault.”

That makes Kihyun exhale through his nose, a humorless huffed laugh, and it makes it worse that Wonho really means it but he couldn’t be further off the mark. “You’d be surprised,” he mutters. “Anyway, I left, let’s see. Almost four months ago. In May. No, he doesn’t know I’m here, I haven’t spoken to him since.”

“If he asks me if I know where you are,” Wonho begins carefully, but Kihyun shakes his head and cuts him off: “He won’t. He hasn’t tried to contact me. I told you, it’s all my fault, and he doesn’t even _want _to hear from me.”

Wonho tilts his head to the side, plush lips pouting, aww, and reaches to squeeze Kihyun’s hand too tightly again. “And you expect me not to feel bad for you when you say things like that? Kihyun, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t,” Kihyun says, suddenly savage, and jerks his hand away, leaving Wonho startled. “I’m serious. Please don’t say things like that, you have no reason to be sorry for me.”

“I’m not sorry for you,” Wonho says. He’s not making that face anymore, either, that brainless saccharine pout of well-intentioned pity. Just as suddenly as Kihyun’s anger had flared, it’s gone again, and he remembers instead why Wonho had integrated himself into Kihyun’s tiny, incestuous group of friends so quickly and so easily in college; there’s a touch of the prophetic about Wonho, not in the sense of seeing the future, but in the sense of seeing the truth. So Kihyun shuts up and lets Wonho see him, just for a moment, and Wonho, looking so much like his old self from before all that happiness rotted his brain, explains, “I’m sorry _with _you. If you won’t tell me what you did wrong, then I’ll take your word for it that you were the one at fault, but that doesn’t make it any easier to lose someone you love, and that doesn’t make you any less my friend. You can stay with us as long as you like, and it’s not charity, before you get offended. You know I would do it for anyone, but you’re not anyone, you’re my best friend, and I’m really glad you called me.”

His best friend. Seriously? Kihyun barely speaks to him, doesn’t keep up with his videos, never texts him first. Doesn’t Wonho talk to Minhyuk or Hyungwon? He’s got his husband, isn’t his husband his best friend? Kihyun is struck by the mirror-image of Wonho’s life against his own; isolated in marriage to a wealthy man — though Shownu, despite his efforts, can’t compare in earnings to Changkyun — and the master of a house in the semi-countryside that no one ever visits. Wonho must be lonely, too, although he has his followers and subscribers to keep him company. Kihyun tries to think if that would make _him _any less lonely, and decides that it would not. “Okay,” he says, and his voice is just a little hoarse. He remembers when Changkyun said _I’d do this for any of my friends, if they needed a place to stay, _only having one friend in the first place, and he can’t take another sip of his coffee, he sets the mug down on the table and stares into the murky inch left at the bottom of the cup. “Thank you.”

“You always look so awkward when you say that,” Wonho laughs, and the moment passes and Kihyun’s chest feels looser again. 

Wonho had met him at the bus station in his mid-2010s Mercedes, nice enough upon first glance to make Kihyun bristle but the sting fades once he sees that it was clearly purchased “gently used,” and hugged him tightly and not asked any questions and driven him back to his and Shownu’s house, ten minutes’ drive that may as well have been ten hours. Kihyun has been to this house before, just once, a few months after Wonho returned from his honeymoon, and they all spent the weekend there together, trying to relive their college glory days and pretending not to be disappointed when it clearly didn’t work. The house had seemed so grand back then, so nice, impressive, even, but now it’s small and dusty and weak compared to Kihyun’s palatial home, and every flaw is glaring, the roof needs to be re-tiled, the large pond that takes up most of the front lawn is in dire need of landscape work, the curtains are dusty, the floorboards all creak. But Wonho comes to life here, blossoms, shows Kihyun the room in which he films his videos and then the wine cellar, priorities, and, finally, a ground-floor guest room which has its own full bath, Kihyun’s new temporary shelter. Kihyun only has the one suitcase to unpack, but he’ll do it later, and for now, he lets Wonho give his coffee cup a refill. He’d gotten lucky, Wonho had taken mercy and given him a mug from Shownu’s university, but Wonho is drinking out of one that says _I love you more and more each day _on it, and Kihyun can’t look at it without feeling mildly sick. 

Kihyun has caught them at a good time, or a bad time, depending on how he thinks about it. The school year has just begun anew, so Shownu won’t be home much, leaving Wonho to his own devices, which now include Kihyun. Wonho keeps reassuring Kihyun that he’s both welcome to stay as long as he wants and “safe here,” whatever that means, as though Kihyun were ever the one in any kind of danger, but Kihyun recognizes the kindness for what it is the same way a colorblind person might react upon seeing distinct shades of red and green. They finish their coffee together and Wonho looks guiltily at his phone and says, “I’m really sorry but I’m supposed to be livestreaming in a few minutes, do you mind if I…?” 

“Please, don’t let me impose,” Kihyun says, and Wonho is visibly thrown by such a gracious, nonjudgmental Kihyun, but he’s pleased, smiles at him and puts both their mugs directly in the dishwasher, then heads off into the dappled sunlit distance to tell his adoring fans about his favorite new method to make avocado smoothies or whatever the fuck it is he brainwashes them about, leaving Kihyun alone in the kitchen. Under normal circumstances, this would be when Kihyun would get up to snoop, but now he frankly couldn’t care less about what he might find in Wonho’s cupboards. Don’t Shownu and Wonho get bored, all the way out here by themselves? At least Changkyun and Kihyun have Manhattan a stone’s throw away; New Paltz is as in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere as you can be in the Hudson River Valley. Kihyun can hear Wonho talking, across the ground floor, and he really hopes sound doesn’t carry as well through the rest of the house (they’ve all gotten way more details about Wonho’s sex life than they’ve ever wanted to have), and he checks by going into what he already inadvertently considers to be his room. Once there, he sits on the edge of the bed and listens to the hopeful silence, and sure enough, he can’t hear a single peppy advertisement for yogurt brands or prostate massagers, so he tiredly sets about unpacking his suitcase.

Wonho’s trustworthy, Kihyun knows that. But as he hangs his sweaters and shirts up in the narrow closet — dusty, smelling of mothballs, there’s an old lacrosse stick in the corner that Kihyun is pretty sure belongs to neither half of the happy couple — his heart is beating fast, because Changkyun is close enough that Kihyun can all but feel him, and he knows Wonho has his number, he could call him, he could text him, he could somehow tip him off. Changkyun could come tonight, if Wonho reached out to him, and it’s a terrible thing, such a painful thing, to put all his faith into just one person who has no reason at all to protect Kihyun after the frankly pathetic friend Kihyun has been to him. All these years, and in college, too, Kihyun mainly remembers blowing off Wonho’s attempts to hang out one-on-one, only ever showing up to see him when they were all together, and even then it was always a hard sell. But somehow Wonho keeps trying — there’s something Changkyunesque about him, his determination to reach for Kihyun’s heart when Kihyun keeps it locked so firmly away — and he doesn’t resent Kihyun or hold the past against him. Tenderly he extends unearned forgiveness. Kihyun knows he won’t be betrayed here. 

He finishes unpacking his bag and finds himself, to his own surprise, exhausted, so he shivers through five minutes in the shower, disdaining the water pressure the whole time against his best efforts to be grateful for what little he has left, then gets into bed. The springs creak but not too badly. Wonho texts him, having the tact to not just burst in the way Minhyuk doubtless would have if Kihyun had chosen him instead, to ask how Kihyun is doing and if he needs anything, and Kihyun texts back that he’s okay and that he’s going to take a quick nap. He curls up small under the sheets, softer than at the Best Western but nothing like the ones at home, and he thought he’d be too wired to be able to get any rest, but he’s out before he knows it, and awakens when the sun is already setting and there is another voice speaking further off inside the house. 

Fuck, somehow Kihyun hadn’t thought through this aspect of it, that Shownu would have to see him in the depths of his despair. As he sits up and tries to fix his hair, he wonders if it would be possible to get his schedule from Wonho so he can avoid seeing him entirely, but Shownu is his host as much as Wonho is, it would be rude to hide just because Kihyun is ashamed of the miserable state he’s in. Because — and he hadn’t noticed until he was thrown headfirst into the joyful cesspool that is the Son-Lee family home — he is miserable, well and truly, it hangs heavy on him like rocks in jacket pockets pulling him to the riverbed, but despite the weight, he wades to his feet, puts on a clean set of clothes, and joins them in the living room.

“Hi, sleepy! I’m so sorry if we woke you!” Wonho smiles. There is a third mug waiting for him on the coffee table, and Shownu looks appropriately solemn and commiserative as Kihyun comes into the room, but Kihyun can’t hold eye contact, he just can’t, and he smiles tightly and sits in one of the available chairs, tucking a still-damp strand of hair back into place, grasping at whatever small semblance of normalcy he can reach.

“No, not at all, I shouldn’t sleep too long anyway,” he says, taking the third mug — this one has a picture of two lovebirds nestled together on a telephone wire. He instinctively imagines it electrocuting them and feels even worse. “Thank you so much for having me, Professor. I’m so sorry we have to meet again under these… circumstances.” 

A hollow word for what’s going on, but it’s suitably neutral, and Shownu’s responding polite grimace is appropriate as well, and he leans forward as if to pat Kihyun on the shoulder but refrains. “Surely now you can call me Shownu, or Hyunwoo if you prefer,” he says in lieu of actually acknowledging anything else; a true gentleman, always so classy, but Kihyun can’t even revel in it at Changkyun’s expense anymore. “In fact, consider it a requirement for staying under our roof.” He’s clearly joking, and Kihyun cracks a smile, too, and Shownu waits for Kihyun’s nod before pushing a small tin across the coffee table to him. “Not much of a housewarming gift, I’m afraid, but Hoseok mentioned these were your favorite brand, and I hope it’s— well, not any consolation, but at least a small comfort.”

He draws his hand away, and Kihyun tilts his head to see the label, chocolate-almond-anise biscotti, Kihyun’s favorite brand, and Kihyun remembers laughing with Changkyun in the Soho apartment’s kitchen, counting the seconds, how long they could dip each individual cookie in coffee before it became unsalvageable, anise kisses, Changkyun’s lower lip sweet and slick and his eyes sparkling under his too-long bangs and they didn’t fuck that morning even though they could have, Kihyun just lay on his chest and Changkyun fiddled with the tag of Kihyun’s shirt and they talked about propaganda, and Kihyun sets his lovebird mug on the coffee table and stands, and his hands shake so he curls them into loose fists and takes deep breaths. “Thank you,” he says stiffly. “I’m sure Wonho— Hoseok— told you all about why I’m here. I appreciate the hospitality, but I won’t impose on you for long, I’d feel terrible if I did, given that I’m the one that got myself into this mess, and my sins shouldn’t be on your head. Thank you.”

“They’re just cookies, Kihyun,” Wonho says gently, sounding uncomfortably like Minhyuk, and Kihyun swallows and shakes his head and excuses himself, and the living room is silent behind him as he walks quickly back to his own corner of the house.

Maybe this had been a mistake — coming here, throwing himself at Wonho and Shownu’s mercy. Shownu had been sitting so close to Wonho, but not in a way that felt contrived, in a way that was natural and easy, like he couldn’t even imagine a world in which they sat further apart. Maybe if Kihyun wanted to convince himself that he was never in love with Changkyun in the first place, that Changkyun was never really in love with him, this was the wrong place to go. All Changkyun ever did was reach for Kihyun’s hand, and most of the time Kihyun let him take it. Kihyun squeezes his eyes shut and can’t stop picturing Changkyun’s sweet and open face as Kihyun tried to make him laugh, and death would be kinder than this to both of them, it really would have been.

He washes his face in cold water. After twenty minutes or so, he feels confident in his ability to not snap at poor Shownu again, so he makes his return, and Wonho is already cooking dinner because of course he is, and there is no acknowledgment of Kihyun’s earlier outburst — Shownu just pushes out a chair for him and asks him what kind of wine he’d prefer to go with his cassoulet. Both of them politer now, Shownu at a cooler distance, they make small talk about anything except the gaping bleeding Changkyun-shaped wound in the room, and Wonho is wearing an apron and probably trying not to be too obviously happy, what with Kihyun in such obvious despair, but not succeeding in the slightest. They eat, and they chit-chat, and Kihyun drinks two glasses of wine that don’t help dull the sting of seeing Shownu helping Wonho clear the table, the pair of them with their heads tilted together as they murmur to each other in soft lovers’ voices, call each other _Hyunwoo _and _Hoseok _in such a private way, but at least they let Kihyun load up the dishwasher as thanks for the meal and the roof over his head. 

Did Changkyun and Kihyun ever have a love like this? Even if artificial, even if built entirely on a series of perfectly crafted lies. Kihyun had found the disposable camera from their day at Coney Island tucked into one of the inside pockets of the suitcase; presumably he’d stuffed it in there intending to use it on their honeymoon but forgotten all about it. He could finally get the photographs developed, two years after the fact. So hard to believe it’s been that long since then — he can taste the cotton candy on his tongue, feel Changkyun’s sunscreen-sticky hand pressed against his own. If he gets the photos developed, he knows they won’t reveal anything; Kihyun had taken them, they’ll look how he wanted them to look. And candid pictures of Changkyun and his counterfeit husband are few and far between. The wedding photos — Kihyun has a selection on his computer, but he was so on-edge that whole week, they won’t be any more revelatory than the photo in the New York Times, than that first selfie he’d sent to the groupchat. He has no pictorial evidence of there ever having been love at all, from either side. No evidence at all — except for feeling, the least reliable evidence of all.

_Like that? _Kihyun thinks, watching Shownu’s hand run over a spare stretch of Wonho’s skin, just his forearm, as Wonho flits past him to put the last of the leftovers in the fridge, as Wonho turns to smile at him, soft from his cheeks to his eyes, ice cream in the Sahara with adoration. _No. Changkyun loved me better._

Shownu can’t stay up too late, he apologizes, he has class early in the morning, and Wonho is incapable of doing anything independently, so after Wonho hugs Kihyun one more time against his pinched-face protests, they retire to their upstairs suite. Kihyun eyes the mostly-finished second bottle of red, but he’s not to the point where he’ll get wine-drunk by himself in his friend’s kitchen. He goes to his room instead, wonders if Minhyuk would be doubly upset if he knew where Kihyun is — Kihyun has spent more time at his place than at Wonho’s, that’s certain, but he’s never stayed for more than a weekend at a time, and God knows how long he’ll be stuck here. To say nothing of Hyungwon, but again, fuck him. Somehow everything is suddenly a reminder of how acutely Kihyun has failed as a human being, and he gets back into bed after changing out of his clothes for the second time that day, shedding one more layer of snakeskin, and he lays his head on the pillow and closes his eyes. Tomorrow will take him that much further away from the last time he saw Changkyun — Aurora, trapped in time, he could still be sleeping in their bed for all Kihyun knows, awaiting true love’s kiss. 

Kihyun’s chest hurts. He rolls over onto his back and blinks at the ceiling. Does counting sheep actually work? He hasn’t tried that since childhood. One. Two. A sigh that’s not his, and for an _insane _second— heart-stopping madness— Kihyun thinks— but then there is another one, and Kihyun’s eyes flicker to find the source of the noise and settle on the dark grille of the air conditioning vent in the corner, above the closet door. A third sigh. A deep murmur, from somewhere, a quiet giggle, and— oh, Christ, this is the last thing Kihyun needs. They couldn’t refrain for _one _night? Adding insult upon insult to self-inflicted injury. This probably _is _refraining, for them, because now it sounds like Wonho’s mouth is covered or busy, and Kihyun grabs the second pillow, puts it tightly over his face, and hopes it works. 

_MONTH 31_

Wonho was so much fun when they were in college. He had a wildness that was unrestrained, even compared to the likes of Minhyuk, a sort of no-holds-barred approach to everything he did, to say nothing of all the weed he kept them all well-supplied with. Up for anything, that was his deal, sometimes to a concerning degree. He was so much fun, but now he does a lot of bullet journaling and runs a moderately successful food blog. Kihyun can’t even bring himself to resent him when he’s so happy, happy in such a real way, it’s practically fucking tangible in the air how happy he is. He’s Jane Bennet with his perfect respectable Bingley. And what does that make Kihyun? Even Wickham got a happy ending. What’s Kihyun going to get?

They’ve been spending a lot of time alone together, Kihyun and Wonho. Mainly Wonho edits his videos and works on his “spreads,” whatever that means, and Kihyun sits in the same room with a book and doesn’t read a single word. Maybe he should stop committing to things based on how easy they seem to pull off. He’d chosen Changkyun because killing him seemed like it would be easy; he’d chosen Wonho because it was an easier route than anything else. Of course the process of Changkyun had been anything but straightforward, and in comparison, Wonho is a breezy summer stroll, but that doesn’t make it any more enjoyable, being faced with all this blissful wedded nonsense when Kihyun is at his absolute worst. The amount of novelty kitchen towels alone, Jesus fucking Christ. Doesn’t Wonho get tired of living in a Thomas Kincaid painting? It’s a postcard-perfect existence, it can’t be sustainable. Shownu brings Wonho a little gift home every single day, be it a flyer for an interesting event happening in town that weekend, a pen he picked up at the student center, a bouquet of flowers on Friday afternoons. Kihyun had never pegged him for the magpie type — _snowglobes on his desk at the office, tacky-scratchy touristy scarves, e-cards for no particular reason, _Kihyun feels sick at the comparison — but it makes Wonho so happy, his eyes light up so intensely when he hears the car crunching up the gravel driveway that Kihyun always has to look away. 

He’s much less isolated than Kihyun had assumed, too. Wonho is in multiple book clubs and goes to yoga with the local moms, and Minhyuk and Hyungwon both call him. A lot. Each time Wonho’s phone rings and he looks at the caller ID and then with some degree of guilt at Kihyun and leaves the room, Kihyun feels exceedingly strange. He hadn’t realized they kept in so much touch. The first few times he’d eavesdropped, wanting to ensure, yet again, Wonho’s trustworthiness, and had found that all they talked about was Wonho’s latest video and some Kardashian indignity from the news. No mention of Kihyun, no speculation as to his whereabouts or his state of being — has Changkyun really not reached out to anyone? Doesn’t he _care? _Kihyun answers texts, when he gets them, as normal; dodges invitations to lunch and provides only vague platitudes as to how he’s doing, if asked. Nobody’s calling _him_ three times a week just for some light chit-chat. When he’d had Changkyun, the isolation had been welcome, even preferable, but now that it’s been thrown into such glaring relief against Wonho’s connectedness, he’s not so sure. At any rate, he feels less justified in having pitied Wonho for his perceived loneliness, as he’s clearly fucking flourishing, and Kihyun withers more and more each day. 

He eats, he sleeps, he dreams of Changkyun. Out here, his options for things to do other than self-reflection are few and far between, Shownu’s insistence that New Paltz is rife with activities notwithstanding. Kihyun is becoming a shade of himself, something introspective and pale, a dim reflection of what he’d once wanted to be, and nothing is enough to fill his idle hands. He and Wonho go for walks when Wonho’s not filming or gossiping or hanging out with happier, more interesting people. It’s a cold and bleak October, appropriate for Kihyun’s ever-gloomy mood, but Wonho is irrepressible, wearing his brightly-colored athleisure and chattering to fill the silence, and Kihyun doesn’t hate him, it’s not Wonho’s fault that he is the way he is, either of them, and Wonho’s trying, he’s trying hard to work around Kihyun and his dismal temperament. Before all this, about 80 percent of conversations with Wonho would be about how amazing, wonderful, kind, caring, sensual, and passionate Shownu is; he’s pared it down to about 25, for Kihyun’s sake. Kihyun appreciates the effort, but it’s not like anything could really make him feel _better. _The prospect of ever feeling better is impossible, a non-starter. Not for lack of trying on Wonho’s sake — he wants to spend every spare minute together, either to support Kihyun emotionally or to keep him too distracted to do himself any harm, serious or otherwise, and as a result, Kihyun has gotten more familiar with the terrain surrounding Wonho’s home than he was with the landscape surrounding his own.

“—and that’s all it came down to, in the end, a stupid miscommunication,” Wonho says, finishing his latest story about some bullet journal drama that Kihyun had been paying half of his attention to at absolute best, and then, in the exact same tone of voice, without even leaving enough of a pause to indicate a change in subject, he asks, “So how are you?”

“Fine,” Kihyun replies on automaton. It’s not even untrue. He’s not as cold as he could be, currently bundled in one of Shownu’s old winter coats since he hadn’t had the foresight to pack anything warmer than a cable-knit sweater, and it’s too big on him and he can’t get fully comfortable, but at the very least, he’s not cold. “How are _you?”_

“No, no,” Wonho says, and his walking pace slows, and he slips his hand through the crook of Kihyun’s arm so they’re linked at the elbows, their mismatched heights making it difficult to walk without constant collision anyway. “You know how I am. But I have no idea how you’re doing, Kihyun, really.”

Kihyun blinks over to him through the autumn chill, irritated by this disruption of the status quo. “I’m fine,” he repeats. “I told you, there’s no need to worry—”

“How am I supposed to just _not _worry about you?” Wonho exhales, and it curls steam into the October air. “I always worry about you. We all do. Even before everything, you’ve always been the one we worried about the most.”

“Oh.” Kihyun had no idea. But now the thought irritates him, a horsefly circling a little too close for comfort, and he reaches for a magazine to swat it away. “Why? That’s ridiculous. I’m always fine, you know me.”

Wonho doesn’t say anything, and when Kihyun looks up at him again, fully expecting to see that small put-upon pout that means Wonho knows he’s been bested, he’s pensive and serious instead. Unhappy, for once. It doesn’t suit him, but it’s an expression Kihyun has had enough times lately that he can recognize it on someone else. “I do know you,” Wonho says, slow and soft, “and that’s why I’m worried. That’s how I know you’re not fine. It’s okay to miss him, you know.”

Kihyun bristles and makes to pull his arm away from Wonho’s, but the motherfucker’s grip is _strong, _so he can’t, effectively being frogmarched along this lovely leaf-lined path through the Mohonk Preserve. “No, it’s not,” he says, which is the best he can do, and he hopes his tone of voice is acrid enough to make Wonho drop the subject, but he’s not just strong, he’s also stubborn, so of course Wonho shakes his head and insists—

“Of course it is. You can see yourself as the villain in this situation and blame yourself and hate yourself for whatever it is you did, but those feelings that you have for him— they’re not just going to go away.” He bites his lip, peering down at Kihyun, who is staring straight ahead, stricken. “I know you miss him. I can tell.”

“You can?” Kihyun says. His throat has gone dry and it comes out sounding far weaker than he intended, and he frowns, coughing to clear the back of his mouth, but the damage has been done, and Wonho, commiserating, squeezes his arm more tightly, mistaking Kihyun’s response to the dryness of the air for some kind of emotional response. Kihyun doesn’t have the heart to set him straight. 

Wonho just nods, discomfitingly serious. “You always sit on the right so there’s extra space on your left,” he says. “You flinch whenever your phone goes off. You’re still wearing your wedding band. I mean, you miss him. It’s obvious.”

Kihyun hadn’t known he was being observed so closely, and he looks down at the shine of platinum against his ring finger and out again over the trees, some reddening, most barren. “That’s just habit,” he says, resolutely looking ahead, spacing out his blinks to keep his eyes from drying out. “I have— I have the habit of him. That doesn’t mean—”

“You miss him,” Wonho says, softer than all before. “Look. You’re afraid to say his name.”

“I’m not—” Kihyun begins to protest, but he can’t form the word, he can’t utter it, he can’t invoke him here. He closes his mouth again, blinks firmer against the fifty-degree sting, and nods, brief and tight but undeniable.

Wonho’s other hand moves to rub over Kihyun’s forearm. Out of the three of them, Kihyun’s friends, and everybody pitied Changkyun so terribly for only having had one person to attend his wedding but it’s not like Kihyun was far ahead, of course Wonho is the least likely to mock him or stare at him uncomprehendingly or to try to distract him from his feelings with inane hijinks or judge him, even. Wonho is the most likely to be able to understand. “It’s okay,” Wonho says. “I know it’s hard. But it’s okay.”

“It’s harder for him,” Kihyun mutters. The words come out easier than he’d thought they would. “It doesn’t matter— doesn’t matter what I think, or how I feel, or if I miss him or not. All that matters is what I did, and missing him won’t undo that.”

Wonho is obviously painfully curious, but Shownu has been a positive influence on him; he now has the tact not to press for further information. Maybe that’s just innate good grace. “Sure, but you have the feelings regardless of if you want them there,” he points out, gentle. “Fighting it is only going to make things worse.”

“I know,” Kihyun says. He knows. All those months— those years— he pretended, he insisted, he repressed and overcompensated and lied and lied and lied, but how was _he _supposed to know what true love felt like— he’d never felt it before, how was he supposed to recognize it when it came along so suddenly, of course that explains how naturally the plan came together, it all came to him so easily— how didn’t he realize it sooner— it was easier than anything, even than the sex, the easiest part was loving him and being loved by him— how could it have been fake when he was really doing it? The fiction ran too deep, he was fooling Changkyun into believing that Kihyun loved him while fooling himself into thinking that he didn’t, and the more Kihyun hated him, disdained him, neglected him, the more and more he loved him, all while knowing that nobody had ever loved him like that before and now nobody ever will. 

He must have gone quiet; now Wonho is concerned. “Kihyun?” he prompts softly. “Are you okay?”

Stupid question. Kihyun clears his throat again and blinks harder. “Sorry, just— it’s hard to come to terms with everything,” he says without meaning to, but since he’s started, he may as well continue. “It’s hard to be honest about it. Because if I’m honest about that, then I have to take accountability for everything _else, _and—”

“Jesus Christ,” Wonho says, fondly exasperated. “If you didn’t have an affair, and if you didn’t— I don’t even know, literally try to kill him or something, then it can’t _possibly _be that bad. You don’t have to tell me, but _please _stop beating yourself up over it!”

“Right,” Kihyun says tonelessly, the knife twisted in the wound, but Wonho doesn’t notice. It’s the worst thing Wonho could think of. Something so ludicrous he’d offset it with a playful _I don’t even know, _it’s that unimaginable to him. And he wonders why Kihyun is in such fucking bad shape. “Sorry. I know I’m not very fun to be around right now— so needy—”

“Having _needs _doesn’t make you needy,” Wonho says firmly. It’s shocking enough that Kihyun doesn’t even mind the interruption. Where did Wonho learn to talk like this? Which suburban mom taught him how to deal with a termagant? It’s exactly the wrong thing to say, and exactly the right thing to say, and Kihyun shuts up, his teeth sinking hard into the flesh of his inner cheek. “Everyone has needs. It just means you’re human.”

“I don’t feel very human,” Kihyun exhales, and Wonho stops walking completely to pull Kihyun into his arms, enveloping him in a warm and tight butterscotch-scented embrace, and he rubs Kihyun’s back and Kihyun stares over his shoulder into the misty, far-off crags and crooks of the preserve, eyes unseeing. 

When Wonho lets him go, it comes as no surprise that Wonho’s lashes are a little damp, but Kihyun is far from tears. They smile at each other unsteadily, meaning different things, and Wonho takes his arm again and turns him back around on the path so they can return to the house. “If you wanted to,” he says, sniffling just slightly, “and I think you do want to, I think you could reconcile with him.”

“No,” Kihyun says.

“No, you don’t want to, or no, you couldn’t?”

“No,” Kihyun says, harsher. “It’s not like that. You don’t get it.”

“I’m trying to understand—”

“You can’t,” Kihyun snaps. “You can’t understand. How could you possibly understand? Even if I told you, you wouldn’t get it. He wouldn’t want me if I came back— he wouldn’t want me.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Wonho tries, and Kihyun has had enough, he pulls his arm free from his hold and shoves his freezing hand, the one he was going to use to crush the life out of Changkyun’s helpless heart, back into his pocket. “Kihyun…”

“Drop it, Hoseok,” Kihyun says. His teeth hurt from the way he’s clenching his jaw. “_Please.”_

Wonho drops it. They walk back to the house in silence, not touching, but Kihyun can feel that the distance between them isn’t full of hurt on Wonho’s end; Kihyun is in a murky grey area of permissibility, where the level of his emotional disturbance is great enough that he can get away with damn near anything. The pond in the front yard hasn’t frozen over yet — it hasn’t dropped below 32 at night — but it likely will start to soon, and Kihyun slows his walking pace to a halt as they come around the side. 

“You go on,” he says. “I’ll join you in a minute. I’m just gonna sit. Clear my head.”

“Kihyun,” Wonho says, but doesn’t follow it up with anything else. He puts a hand on Kihyun’s arm, gives it a careful squeeze, then nods and lets go. “Okay. See you soon.”

Kihyun waits until he’s made it more than halfway to the front door to turn and lower himself down to the dry grass at the pond’s edge. The sun is hidden by a thick layer of clouds, but the surface of the water is still bright, and Kihyun closes his eyes for a moment but that’s not much better. A stranger in a strange land. Where is his home, now? He measured himself against what he thought Changkyun wanted him to be for so long that he has no idea what’s left, now that Changkyun is gone. He looks down at his hands, rolls the wedding band in a slow and careful orbit. Even though he didn’t know it, his plan was doomed from the start — if he came at Changkyun with a knife, they’d pin the murder on him right away, because Changkyun wouldn’t fight back, he’d have no defensive wounds. Kihyun doesn’t cry. He sits and looks out over the water for a long time. 

_MONTH 32_

Kihyun is beginning to suspect that Wonho and Shownu view him as some sort of pet. They hesitate to leave him at home alone even for one night, when Shownu’s department is having a potluck, but no matter how many times Wonho attempts to invite Kihyun along, he declines. Wonho asks if Kihyun would like to come to the grocery store with him in the exact same tone as he might use when asking a spoiled, brachycephalic Shih Tzu if it wants to go for a walk. Kihyun declines that, too. But they continue to bring him home the occasional treat and suggest outings, likely not far from setting up gates to restrict him to certain areas of the house for fear of him chewing up the curtains. This is an unseasonably cold November, snow even from the first week, and Kihyun sits in his room and watches as Shownu installs chains on the wheels of Wonho’s car, then as Wonho rushes out to him wearing mittens and holding a travel mug of hot cocoa. They fuck a _lot, _somehow, despite Shownu’s busy semester and Wonho’s various activities, and last week Kihyun actually allowed Wonho to take him into town so he could buy decent noise-cancelling headphones for lack of any other recourse, and Wonho saw the box and smiled sheepishly, his cheeks going a pretty, bashful pink, but he made no attempt at an apology or an excuse. They’re happy. It’s a happy house. Not even Kihyun’s torrential rain can ruin their permanent parade.

He looks for work, idly. Scrolls through listings for positions in libraries, journals, consulting firms. He can’t stay here forever, he knows that, and as soon as he finds an appropriate destination he’ll have to ask Wonho for one final loan and then go and never see any of them again. The hospitality Wonho and his husband have shown him is already far too much, far more than someone like Kihyun deserves, and he knows it will start to run thin soon; Shownu has given no indication of wanting Kihyun out, but of course his life would be better if Kihyun were to leave. Kihyun doesn’t want to get a job, he doesn’t want to make any difficult choices, but above all, he doesn’t want to inconvenience his hosts any more than he already has. He’ll find something soon, of this he’s sure, and then he’ll go. Strange to think, painful to remember, that all of this had started with Wonho; at his wedding, while watching the grooms exchange I-dos, Kihyun couldn’t have just been happy for his friend — no, he’d been drawing comparisons and blaming his problems on the world rather than on the obvious flaws in his own character and plotting, in fact, murder. This whole asinine adventure, so pointless, began because Kihyun had wanted to prove to himself that he could be better than Wonho at something — that he _was _better than him already, and securing Changkyun’s fortune was simply to be the cherry atop the masterfully crafted cake. Only fitting that it truly ends here, that Kihyun gives it all up here, forsakes his dream and what it meant to him, in the beating heart of Wonho’s triumphs. He lost. He was always going to lose. 

Even still — in a way, the spark has not gone out, not completely, not yet. He can only sit through so many cookie-cutter romantic comedies with Wonho before he’s itching to criticize, and that reminds him of touring houses with Changkyun and everything that happened after, the way Changkyun delighted in any slivers of Kihyun’s innate meanness that he allowed to show through. Kihyun’s phantom limb itches. Terrible, really, so terrible that Kihyun forced Changkyun into isolation and ended up enjoying his company as a result. How could he not? He remembers the image of Changkyun resplendent in Versace on 5th Avenue and shivers. Even through all his attempts to mold Changkyun into any shape he wanted, trying to make him perfect, Changkyun was always Changkyun, constant, always himself despite Kihyun’s imposed changes. Kihyun, in contrast, is fickle and mercurial, has no idea who he really is — he only felt truly like himself when he was with Changkyun, but he doesn’t even know what that _means, _only that it is now gone, likely for good. It’s something like this, though, like what he struggles to hold back now; at one point he has to cover his own mouth under the guise of stifling a yawn so he doesn’t insult the main character’s stupid cardigan. Maybe it’s good, that he still has the urge to be mean, that he can still find things to feel superior about. _He’d _never waste his time on pilates and baking and the TLC channel, after all. He thinks Changkyun just might agree. It always was so funny when he tried to be his own kind of mean to keep up with Kihyun. Kihyun finds himself smiling about nothing in particular, and Wonho misinterprets that as interest in the movie and excitedly brings out a box set of the rest of the series. “Which one do you want to watch next?” Wonho asks. “_From the Heart _or _One in a Million?”_

Kihyun chooses at random. Not for the first time, not even today, he wishes Changkyun were here. At least they always had fun together, even when things were otherwise awful between them. At least Changkyun was never boring. _My God, _Kihyun thinks suddenly, and it sinks in his heart like a stone. _I don’t just love him, I _like _him. _He misses the next movie completely, too horrified by that realization. He’s been doing a lot of that lately — realizing things, being appalled, losing time. What’s the point of all this introspection? Whom does it benefit? Certainly not Kihyun; not Changkyun, either. He likes him, fuck, he really does, despite everything. Despite his pretentiousness, despite his bouts of melancholy, despite the way he mumbles. Or maybe — maybe not _despite, _but _because of, _which is inarguably worse. Nobody compares to Changkyun, in retrospect. Nobody made Kihyun light up like that. Nobody wanted him so much and gave him so much and asked for so little. Changkyun had opened up to him so immediately, so easily, and Kihyun just spat it back at him, and now that soft and tender epiphany of finding his husband of over a year _likable _is soured, curdling, spoiled just like everything else. 

“I missed our wedding anniversary,” Kihyun blurts out, aloud, in the middle of a tooth-achingly romantic scene on the TV. “One year. Can you believe that?”

Wonho had been startled by the outburst, but now regards Kihyun more evenly, calculating what to say, how to walk this particular tightrope. “It’s just a day,” he says. “Time is what you make of it.”

Kihyun snorts, but it more or less works; he no longer feels as rotten. He supposes there are significant advantages to spending this much time with vapid, charitable Wonho — it makes it easy to forget what he is. Wonho’s not as vapid as he’d always seemed, though, as Kihyun learns when he finally watches one of his videos, curled up in bed with the brightness and volume on his computer turned nearly all the way down, as though he’s afraid of being caught supporting someone. They are cute, just like Shownu had said on that one beautiful sunlit midmorning, hillside in Saint-Lizier with Changkyun offering Kihyun apricots and careful touches, God, Kihyun can’t believe he missed their anniversary, forgot about it completely — the videos are cute and genuinely thoughtful, Wonho giving detailed, honest reviews of products, reading viewer questions and responding with empathetic advice that’s shockingly wise, flexing his cartoonishly perfect muscles but reminding his audience that what’s healthy is different for everyone, and only you can figure out what’s right for you. Kihyun very nearly wishes that Wonho thought higher of him, that Wonho didn’t have to see him this way, that Wonho could understand that Kihyun never meant to hurt him, not really, that sometimes he can’t help the way he acts. But he’s fairly certain that Wonho already knows, and that means Kihyun never has to voice it. Wonho forgives him, and doesn’t mind that he’s here, and Kihyun isn’t having a horrible time overall anymore. Last week Kihyun caught Wonho on the back porch with a THC pen and they passed it back and forth for the better part of half an hour before Kihyun felt sick that he was enjoying himself, that he was feeling good, while Changkyun might have figured everything out, connected all the broken pieces Kihyun left behind, that he might be there now, sad and betrayed and all alone in that big stupid house they picked out together. Kihyun threw up in the garden and Wonho stroked his hair and helped him back into the house, into bed, and Kihyun didn’t leave his room for the next three days. (Just because he’s not having a horrible time doesn’t mean he’s having a good one.) But he’s managing, at least. No longer at any kind of risk. He doesn’t know where he’d be, if not here. So he may as well make the most of it.

He cooks dinner a fair amount and loads the dishwasher and tidies up the kitchen afterwards. Shownu and Wonho have given up on trying to fight Kihyun on this, since by now it’s been three months, he’s more than just a houseguest. Kihyun finds himself cooking the way he would for Changkyun, watching the spice levels, avoiding cruciferous vegetables. Wonho brings him his old beat-up _Joy of Cooking, _and Kihyun doesn’t even resent the implications that he can’t cook without a recipe. He passes the time, he looks for work, he learns to tolerate the sight of Wonho greeting Shownu when he comes home from campus without feeling stabs of longing so severe they leave him biting the inside of his cheek to the point of bleeding. He shouldn’t get used to this, there’s not enough room for him here, but he _is _used to it for now, he likes pretending he could have a life like this, ignoring that he had that chance and he blew it. Now he’s the one who invites Wonho out on walks, and maybe he’s doing better, or maybe this is really it this time, maybe when he leaves them sooner rather than later he’ll get lost in the woods and not get found. So much for lack of risk. But he doesn’t know how else he’s meant to cope with finding the rarest thing, the greatest thing, a love so strong it gestated even in his barren heart, and losing it completely — not just losing it, but killing it, throttling it, squeezing out every last drop of lifeblood. Voluntarily; nobody guided him. If someone, anyone else had done what he’d done, come up with this plan and then met their mark and found that he was sweet, kind, over-generous, whimsical, intelligent, a _firecracker _in bed, all in all the perfect, perfect match, surely they’d have called off the murder plan and thought, _why not give this a go for real? _But Kihyun, hating himself and not wanting to let Changkyun get too close, had only wanted to murder him more, for the simple crime of making Kihyun _want. _

The guilt is mostly gone and all that’s left is regret. Kihyun had missed the wedding anniversary, but Wonho’s right, it’s just a day — what matters is what had happened on the day itself. Belatedly, Kihyun tries to remember their wedding, their honeymoon, and finds that he can’t. Beyond the broad-strokes details, he remembers so little beyond his own irritation with the presence of his friends, his unfounded paranoia and fierce, animal jealousy over the way Changkyun regarded Jooheon, Christ, he wasn’t even _present _on their wedding night, he was too busy wishing for something else. He can’t remember the look on Changkyun’s face as they walked each other down the aisle. He spent the whole honeymoon counting down the days until they were home and combined finances. After all of Changkyun’s careful planning, no expense spared, no detail forgotten, to make it to Kihyun’s liking. What else has Kihyun forgotten, in his haste to walk Changkyun up to the guillotine? What he wouldn’t give for a return to those early days of easy intimacy, meeting up for a quick lunch, holding hands on the subway, the way Changkyun stilled when Kihyun kissed him for the first time. Wasted, all wasted, Changkyun gave it out so freely to such an ungrateful wretch. Kihyun took him so for granted. 

Another thing — another thing Kihyun would give anything, anything to remember. Their actual first meeting. King’s Street Coffee, which doesn’t count as the first time they met to Kihyun, but somehow still does to Changkyun. He wishes so fervently that he could really remember that moment, bumping into him, the exact words he’d said, the exact look on Changkyun’s face. He hadn’t known it, but that was the moment his life changed irrevocably, that had been the hinge, the juncture, the switch that he didn’t know to flip. Things could have been so different, had he just gone a little slower. Not run away, after telling Changkyun, a perfect stranger, to fuck off. He could have stayed there in the doorway and let Changkyun apologize and apologize to him in turn for being over-hasty, he could have just had him all along, they could have been friends first, they could have done this all for real. But Kihyun, too dedicated to his plan, had been unable to consider any option other than the one he’d already picked out for himself. Maybe Changkyun was onto something; maybe it really was fate that brought them together. Kihyun had chosen him, yes, and is now being exquisitely punished for that choice, but fate put them both in the same place at the same time, first. Everything could have been different. They could have been happy, truly happy. Kihyun is never going to forgive himself for not staying longer that one day in April, a lifetime ago. They could have been happy. Instead, that happy version of the two of them, where they both get what they both want, is locked away and hidden, and Kihyun is here, miserable, and Changkyun is somewhere else, in parts unknown, in a condition that Kihyun is frightened to imagine.

Fuck. Since that time in the back garden with Wonho’s soft hand on the back of his head and his soft voice murmuring to take deep breaths, he’ll get him some water in just a second, Kihyun has tried not to think too much about how Changkyun is currently doing. He’s childish, reckless, utterly unconcerned with his own safety, his generosity has made him an afterthought to himself. Does he look both ways before he crosses the street? Does he remind Lena of his allergies? Is he sleeping enough, is he eating well, is he warm at night? Kihyun’s fragile plum, so delicate, so unsuited to living by himself. Once Kihyun opens his heart to the possibility of worrying, it’s difficult to stop. Changkyun is so trusting, so optimistic, always sees the very best in people — he’d done so for Kihyun, after all, the most insidious of serpents. Who else has wormed their way past his easily-surmounted defenses? Kihyun had been so pleased with Changkyun’s idiot trusting nature in the early days, but now all he can do is despair when he remembers it. His nearsighted, left-handed, bisexual husband, so much overwhelming privilege but all these tiny limitations that make him that much less self-sufficient, that much more dependent on Kihyun to hold him and guide him and tell him what to do. Is he being careful? Does he think about Kihyun? All Kihyun can hope for is that he isn’t quite too sad. 

It’s worst on Kihyun’s birthday. Kihyun had made it very clear, as unambiguous as he could be without outright rudeness, that there is to be no celebration, that he wants to be left alone, that he doesn’t want congratulations or a party or gifts. This is very difficult for Wonho, who adores throwing parties, to accept, but he must see how serious Kihyun is about this and so he acquiesces before too long, and it’s not like Shownu was particularly invested in celebrating Kihyun’s 30th anyway. In fact, they offer to leave the house completely to get dinner in town, and even though that feels dangerously close to a special favor, being nice to him on his birthday, Kihyun accepts. He wakes up to texts and emails from people he can’t hear from right now, deletes them all unread, goes back to sleep for as long as he can but it’s fitful, he needs at least to eat, so he slowly chews a granola bar and drinks half a bottle of water and stares out of the window at the nondescript whiteness blowing across the sky. 

Thirty years. A new decade; inarguably no longer a young man. The last two, nearly three, years have been the brightest of Kihyun’s life — what does that say about him? He knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that his best days are behind him and that while they were going on, he was completely unable to focus on how fortunate he was, too busy planning for a future he was too weak to manifest. He spends the day alone. He wonders if Changkyun is thinking about him, somewhere out there, somewhere in the snow. Has it really been a year since Changkyun gave Kihyun a building, metaphorically the whole world, and Kihyun slapped him for his kindness, and they lay together in the crushed flowers underneath for hours until the sun began to set? Not speaking, only occasionally fucking, Kihyun permitting Changkyun to distract him from his anxieties about the passage of time. There is nothing left to distract Kihyun now. No way for him to pretend he’s not horrified, existentially, viscerally, by his steady downslide into middle age, though that’s another ten years ahead at least. Kihyun clears his email’s trash so he doesn’t have to even acknowledge that the message from his father exists somewhere on his phone. Wonho put dinner for Kihyun in the fridge, just leftovers, nothing special, and Kihyun stands in the kitchen and stares blankly at the oven while it heats up. He eats even though it’s too hot and burns his mouth, then returns to his room, but he’s restless, he doesn’t want to lie back down and be motionless, has Changkyun Pavlov-trained him into expecting birthday sex? He forces himself, though, to get into bed and stay there, even as energy buzzes underneath his skin. He’s never been one to enjoy meditation or anything remotely similar — why would he want to be truly isolated in his own head? — but he tries to wipe his mind blank, not think about how old he’s gotten, how he wasted his whole youth, how he’s going to die utterly unloved, utterly alone. Hopefully sooner rather than later, at least, so he doesn’t have to get much older. When he’d told Changkyun, two years ago, that he hadn’t ever had a birthday that good, he wasn’t even lying. He’s not lying now either when he looks at the insides of his eyelids and thinks, _this might just be the worst birthday I’ve ever had._

He was tired of pretending to be alright, but luckily, he and Wonho are past that phase. Wonho functions and putters around the house doing various tasks, and Kihyun, a man-sized stormcloud, roosts in a chair and keeps him company. But Kihyun is trying not to wallow too severely, and Wonho’s chatter is no longer as incessant, so Kihyun is back to functional. Of course the façade comes right back up when Shownu is home, but Kihyun isn’t the type to wear greasy sweatpants and forego showering for days regardless — his rock bottom is likely very different than, say, Changkyun’s might be. But picturing Changkyun at rock bottom, even looking back on the callous way Kihyun had viewed Changkyun’s confession as to his own brief, but significant, periods of suicidality — it’s too much, and Kihyun has been trying not to draw as many comparisons between himself and the world at large, anyway. It’s very nearly like he’s learned humility, but he’s not sure if it counts as a lesson learned if he’s had no other choice between humility and humiliation. Wonho politely and carefully invites Kihyun to join him in a video, he could use another set of hands to pull off the crafting project he’s been working on, some kind of macramé monstrosity, and Kihyun balks so violently that Wonho apologizes to him for five minutes, brings him a hard lemonade from his own personal stash, and lets Kihyun pick their film for the night. But that’s a blip at worst, and things slide back to normal in another day or so. Kihyun is grieving, or coping, or healing, or whatever he’s deciding to call it at that exact moment, and Wonho doesn’t mind. 

And yet—

“The countdown is back,” Kihyun says, out of the blue, when they’re collectively cleaning out the other side of the garage. It’s been a strange comfort to Kihyun since he arrived, the messiness of this garage, but not because he feels superior (of course _his _garage is nothing but pristine), but because it makes the house feel even more a home, and Shownu even more a human man. He doesn’t look up to see Wonho’s reaction, if he heard him at all, just picks up an empty box that once contained a panini press and tosses it on the recycling pile.

“What countdown?” Wonho asks, peering around an old Bowflex machine. 

Great, now Kihyun regrets speaking. “It’s not a real countdown,” he clarifies. “Just— metaphorical, I guess.”

“Metaphorical for what?”

“I don’t know,” Kihyun says, grouchy as though he wasn’t the one to bring it up in the first place, as though Wonho is burdening him by asking when Kihyun so clearly wants to talk. “It happens sometimes. Kind of like anxiety, I guess, this feeling that I’m running out of time.”

Wonho regards him thoughtfully, but he knows how Kihyun loathes idleness, so he doesn’t just stare but continues sorting the box of sports equipment he’s been working on for the last twenty minutes. “And it’s back? Where did it go?”

“It was just quiet,” Kihyun says. He walks a few paces to turn up the space heater Wonho had dragged in here upon their entry, pulling his sleeves down as far as he can, then back to work. “I thought by leaving, I had gotten rid of it for good. But evidently not.”

“So you had it before you left,” Wonho murmurs. Over the last couple of months, the gossipy edge has faded from his voice whenever Kihyun makes subtle references to his reasons for departure, and all that’s left is genuine concern. “Before that, too?”

“Pretty much our whole relationship,” Kihyun says, stuttering through the word. “I was always thinking about what would happen at the end.”

There is a limit to how much he can say, how much he can reveal. Wonho doubtless knows this, too, and takes a moment to gather his thoughts into a response while he considers a worn-down baseball mitt. “And were you right?” he asks after a moment and puts the mitt on the donation pile.

Kihyun has to shake his head. “I never thought I’d leave him,” he says. Carefully, carefully. “I always thought he’d leave me.” It’s not a lie. Any sense of the concept of _leaving, _it was always meant to be Changkyun. Strange, to say it out loud, to put it in those words. But he doesn’t regret it. He looks steadfastly at the old guidebooks to countries Shownu has visited, dog-eared and well-loved, and can’t believe he once was jealous of his past successes, wanted Changkyun to help him outperform. When was the last time Kihyun was happy for someone without agenda? He quite honestly can’t recall. “Do you think Hyunwoo will want to keep these?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah, he loves those, doesn’t trust the Internet to tell him where to go,” Wonho smiles, then abruptly remembers he’s supposed to be counseling Kihyun through a crisis right now and sobers. “I think— well, I don’t have that much information, but it sounds like you start to get that kind of anxiety when you want something to change.”

Kihyun frowns. “What do you mean?”

“You’re unhappy, or at least dissatisfied, with how things are,” Wonho explains. “So you want a change, and it’s expressed via this countdown. Does that sound right?”

In recent months, Wonho has gotten quite adept at wrangling Kihyun. He refrains from making overly firm assumptions, just presents them as hypotheticals and lets Kihyun take or leave them. Yet another accommodation, another example of someone contorting to fit Kihyun’s warped standards. Kihyun tries to accept it as a boon, not as a criticism, and swallows hard and nods. “Yeah— yes, I think so. It’s just annoying, is what it is, honestly. Like, I know, I get it, I would _also _like for this to be over, but it’s taking me a minute.”

Wonho doesn’t reply, and Kihyun rapidly and belatedly realizes that it sounds like what’s triggering the countdown is being _here, _so he quickly corrects: “Not this. Not staying with you, this has been— you know I don’t know how to thank you—” 

“Shut up,” Wonho says through a smile. “I get what you mean. Of course you’re not where you want to be right now. Where _do _you want to be right now?”

Kihyun has no idea. There is no home for him. The absence of a place to belong hurts nearly as badly as the absence of Changkyun, and he has no idea. “I think—”

“Let me rephrase,” Wonho says. “What did you do wrong?”

“We’ve been over this,” Kihyun says, exasperated, “no matter how hard you try to trick me into telling you, I—”

“That’s not what I’m asking about,” Wonho insists. “I know you won’t tell me, that’s your prerogative. I’m asking about the rest. Okay, you did that one undefined bad thing, but before then, what were you doing wrong in your marriage? Or in your relationship? You’re always very hard on yourself, Kihyun, so I know there’s got to be something.”

Kihyun doesn’t even resent the assumption that he was doing something wrong, nor the plain declaration that he has low self-esteem. To his immense surprise, he _wants _to tell him, he wants to explain — but not in the way he nearly did to Hyungwon at the bachelor party, not the way he held himself back from doing in his farewell note, but in a way that Wonho will hear without finding him despicable, afterwards. They both say nothing for a few minutes, long enough that Kihyun thinks maybe Wonho would be alright with moving on, but the words are building in Kihyun’s throat, enough that he chokes when he tries to take a breath, and though they stab the lining of his larynx, he keeps his voice robotic and says, “I wasn’t totally honest with him about who I was. I acted in ways that were unlike me, and I did things I normally wouldn’t ever do, and by the time he started to see through the cracks, it was too late to stop. But it wasn’t an accident or a one-off, like saying you love Tarantino’s work when you actually hate the guy just to impress a stranger at a bar. I did it on purpose. I had a plan. I was very careful, and he didn’t suspect a thing. From day one. I was very good at it, too. Kind of forgot who I really was a lot of the time. And now I’m not doing it anymore, and now I don’t know what’s left.”

A far sadder, far weaker coda than he’d intended. Wonho is no longer rustling with the box, but he’s not looking at Kihyun, either. “Why do you think you did that?” Wonho asks, very, very soft.

Kihyun wants to tell Wonho that everything is all his fault, but he can’t, because it’s not. He finally knows that he has no one to blame but himself, he finally knows he has to take accountability. Even the note he had left for Changkyun was a lie; it wasn’t Changkyun’s fault that Kihyun couldn’t kill him. It wasn’t Changkyun’s fault for asking Kihyun out two minutes after meeting him, even though Kihyun hadn’t expected him to, like it really was love at first sight, like he’d been waiting for him all along. It wasn’t Changkyun’s fault for being so easy to adore. It was Kihyun’s for saying yes, and for adoring him, and for everything after. “Because I didn’t want to let him close to me,” Kihyun whispers. 

“Why not?”

“Because then he would see me.”

“Why is that a bad thing?”

“Look at me,” Kihyun says, a child pleading through a tantrum. “I don’t want _anyone _to see me. Because he wouldn’t like what he would see. There’s nothing to like. Nothing to love. If I let him close then he would see that, and he wouldn’t want the _real _me, and why should he? Why do I deserve to be wanted? What have I done to earn him? I couldn’t let him know the truth.”

“Kihyun,” Wonho says. “You deserve to be loved.”

Kihyun only knows how to cry like the last drops of a rainstorm. Too little, too late, the unsteady pall of clouds not yet vanished in the distance. He presses the heels of his palms into his closed, burning eyes like he can push the tears back inside, doesn’t even know the last time he cried for real, and curls his shoulders in on himself like a protective cage. He wishes Wonho would say something else so Kihyun isn’t just crying in silence, but whatever Wonho has to say will doubtless make Kihyun cry more, and everything hurts, everything hurts, everything hurts. 

“And I think you know that,” Wonho says. Though always so quick to tears, now he’s not crying at all, and his voice sounds perfectly even. Merciless, in a way. “I think that’s why your countdown is back. There’s nothing you need to _do_. The only change you need to make is realizing that you deserve the things you won’t let yourself want.”

Kihyun’s breath is wet against the skin of his wrists. He wants to say that Wonho is wrong. That he can’t help but worry— he can’t help but think— that while Kihyun has been falling in love with Changkyun this whole time, Changkyun was in love with a fiction. There may not be a home to return to— he might not like what he sees, when the mask comes off and stays discarded. He’s still crying, and it hurts to cry, too, his eyes aren’t used to the strain, and he remembers the way Changkyun kept mentioning, sometimes, the unintentional, the real. The mole by Kihyun’s mouth, the way his voice sounds in the morning. His favorite authors, the way he hates to be a regular anywhere. It’s beyond stupid to have hope, after everything, but Wonho’s right. Kihyun might not deserve, it would take an act of God to make him believe that he deserves, but he _wants. _He wants Changkyun back. He wants Changkyun to love him. He might even want Changkyun to see him, maybe, if he’d be interested. “I miss him,” he admits, so weak and quiet he can barely hear himself over his own ragged breathing. 

“I know,” Wonho says, God, now he’s crying, too. He comes over and takes Kihyun’s forearms, gently pulls his hands away from his face and gives Kihyun time to recoil, but Kihyun doesn’t, just leans against him and presses his rubbed-raw eyes into his shoulder. “Now do you know where you want to be?”

Kihyun can’t speak. He nods, quick and jerky, and when he breaks away a few minutes later with his tears dried up and his heart no longer beating quite as painfully, he’s made up his mind. Why shouldn’t he make Minhyuk proud? _Kihyun is getting what he wanted, as always. _Even if Changkyun rejects him. Even if he calls the police and Kihyun lives out his days in prison. Why shouldn’t he prove Hyungwon wrong? _Didn’t think you’d find the right guy, and I didn’t think it would last. _He has to know; he has to be sure. He has to at least try. “I might have to borrow a little bit of money,” Kihyun says, wiping his face. 

“As much as you need,” Wonho nods, still crying. “I love you, I’m so proud of you.”

“Stop it,” Kihyun says, but what he really means is, I love you too. 

He packs his bag and leaves the following Thursday. Even Shownu seems a little sad to see him go, after Kihyun tells him that he knows how to get back on his feet and he’ll never be able to thank him and Wonho enough for opening up their home to him these past few months. He offers a hand out for the shaking, then thinks better of it and hugs Kihyun instead, and though a distant part of Kihyun thrills at the validation, he’s too impatient to continue on his journey to be interested in savoring the moment. Kihyun promises to keep in touch. Wonho drives him to the bus station at dusk, and Kihyun checks and double-checks the schedule; there’s too much at stake here to end up in fucking Florida again. Wonho parks the car, then carries Kihyun’s bag for him to the side of the bus, where it is taken and thrown into the depths of the luggage hold. They stand there shivering in their winter coats by the side, watching the other travellers board, and Kihyun looks over to find Wonho’s lower lip all aquiver again, but neither one of them is sad, not really. Kihyun thinks he’s never made a decision this impulsive, this reckless, before, and been so unafraid. 

“I’ll be okay,” he says. “You know that, right?”

Wonho manages a watery smile. “I hope so.” He takes in a breath to say something else, but stops — he knows Kihyun won’t answer. Because despite his lack of fear, Kihyun’s recent superstitions made him unwilling to jinx his pilgrimage, so even though it’s obvious where he’s going, he hasn’t outright confirmed it out loud in so many words. “Call me when you get there? So I know you’re safe?”

“Okay,” Kihyun says. 

“Seriously,” Wonho insists, swiping a stray tear away.

“I’ll try!” Kihyun laughs. “I always forget to do shit like that, but I’ll try. You’ll hear from me, at least.”

“I’d better,” Wonho says. He hugs Kihyun too tightly, but Kihyun doesn’t tell him to ease up, his own arms circling as closely as they can about Wonho’s shoulders. A beat, another, and Wonho lets go and steps back briskly, putting on a brave face. “Go! Or they’ll leave without you!”

“I’ll be okay,” Kihyun repeats to make sure he really gets it, smiles despite his troubles, and heads for the stairs leading into the bus. One final check: yes, 0407, this is the correct route. He turns back to wave to Wonho again, and Wonho waves back, and then can’t help himself and it bursts out of him—

“Where are you going?”

Kihyun pauses, one foot on the steps. “To seek my fortune,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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> i will now be updating **every week, **so chapter 9 will be posted on **april 24. ** subscribe for email updates!!!! thank you so so much for reading this far, we're on the home stretch now!! ugh i do kinda wish i could make yall wait a month for chapter 9 ... but i am merciful, so you will find out what happens soon!! in the meantime, pls do let me know what u thought in the comments or by coming to chat at the links above, hope you are all staying safe and healthy out there, and see yall next week for more murder sad unfun time!!


	9. December

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kihyun comes home.

_DECEMBER_

The bus ride takes an hour and a half. Once he arrives in White Plains, he takes the Harlem-bound train fifteen minutes to Bronxville. _I should have been gone for a year, _Kihyun thinks. _Two years. Four. A series of lacunae in the notebooks of my life. _But he can’t make himself stay away. Doesn’t even want to, anymore. All roads lead him here. 

From the train station in Tuckahoe, it’s a twenty-minute walk. The wheels of Kihyun’s suitcase will likely be unsalvageable by the time he makes it to their front door. In a brief moment of panic, he stops walking and shakes down his pockets for the third time that night to make sure he has his keys. It’s dark and fucking cold. He can hardly see through the snow. But he knows the way back home, and he doesn’t have the money for a taxi — he’d refused, when Wonho had tried to send him with more — so he walks, the suitcase scraping against the frosty sidewalk underfoot. 

“No neighbors around for miles,” Kihyun mutters under his breath, the cold wind biting at his cheeks. “Was that supposed to be a good thing? Christ.”

What’s more, the house is atop a hill. By the time Kihyun has made it to the peak, he needs to unzip the coat, leaving it on but open. He is stopped at the very end of the driveway, and the windows are all dark, the only illumination the lamps in the front garden. Maybe he’s changed the locks. Wouldn’t that be funny. Kihyun curls his stiff fingers around the handle of the suitcase and begins to walk again. No tire tracks in the snow leading up to the garage. Maybe he moved out and the house will be a ghost town and Kihyun will curl up on the marble floor and grow roots. Kihyun hopes he’s just asleep, that he won’t notice when Kihyun slips in through the door and back into his bed, and when he wakes up, he’ll think the last few months have all been nothing but a bad dream to them both. He hopes he hasn’t changed his hair. 

When Kihyun unlocks the door and goes in, quiet and slow, he can see that Changkyun is waiting for him in the parlor just beyond the stairs. The foyer is dark, but there’s light cutting through the grand glass panels on either side of the front door, and so Kihyun can see that Changkyun has a gun, pointed steady and true right at him, his hand not even shaking.

“What do you need that for?” Kihyun asks. 

God, at least he’s alright. At least he’s figured it out. Smart boy, clever boy, Kihyun is nearly proud. “I got it just in case you came back. And here you are,” replies Changkyun. His voice doesn’t shake, either. “Couldn’t keep away? Unfinished business?”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Kihyun says, and Changkyun laughs completely without any feeling. Kihyun leaves his bag by the door, unzips his coat and lets it fall. 

“But you were going to,” Changkyun says. “Weren’t you.”

Kihyun doesn’t answer, because it’s not a question. Changkyun gestures with the gun and Kihyun comes closer, seeing that in the dark his eyes are wild, and at least he’s not upset, at least he’s not sad, Kihyun is so relieved. Changkyun knows how to hold the gun. Kihyun imagines him going to the range and practicing, waiting for his prodigal husband to come home. And here he is, just like Changkyun had said. 

“How did you know?” Kihyun says. They’re closer together now, but he’s sure Changkyun spooks easy, and while it would be incredible poetic justice for Changkyun to kill him here and now, impulsive and brash and semi-accidental, after the years of waiting and planning Kihyun had put into preparing to murder him, he’d rather avoid that for everyone’s sake, so he keeps his voice quiet and his motions telegraphed to keep Changkyun’s finger off the trigger.

Changkyun makes an impatient sound. His fingers move. “How stupid do you think I am? I finally unpacked your books,” he says, spits it like an insult. “Found your notes. They were so detailed, Kihyun, I don’t think anybody’s ever paid me as much attention as you did when you were planning to kill me. I did always say that you were too good to be true.”

Kihyun had destroyed the most incriminating pages, but now he remembers leaving a select few, just in case he lost sight of his end goal. He’d completely forgotten about them, and he wonders what, exactly, Changkyun read about. He doesn’t bother trying to deny any of it; even though the evidence Changkyun has on him is circumstantial at best, could easily be dismissed as the product of Changkyun’s overactive imagination, he won’t insult Changkyun’s intelligence even further. Changkyun’s right, after all. Kihyun is out of things to hide.

He can tell Changkyun has more questions. His hand is still steady, but his breath is starting to tremble. Why me, Changkyun probably wants to ask. Why so long. Why did you keep it going as long as you did. I’d have given you the money, why did you want the rest? Why are you back? Are you finally going to kill me? Or did you just miss me? Kihyun is in a forgiving mood, so he might just answer, if he asks.

Changkyun’s voice is so low. His grip shifts on the pistol. “Was any of it real?”

This one is easy. “No,” Kihyun says.

“Liar,” Changkyun hisses, and then they’re on each other— it doesn’t matter who moves first, they seem to move as one, colliding in the middle and seeking to _hurt. _Kihyun lunges to knock the gun out of Changkyun’s grip, but Changkyun had halfway discarded it already, choosing instead to yank at Kihyun’s shirt. It’s a fierce power struggle, Kihyun is ready to play dirty, he grabs a fistful of Changkyun’s hair and _pulls, _but though Changkyun makes a pained noise, he hooks his ankle around the back of Kihyun’s to steal his balance out from under him. 

Kihyun wants to tear him open, claw into the heart of him and rend him to pieces, and Changkyun is breathing fast and he’s so warm, hot like with a fever, and he shoves Kihyun up against the foyer wall and accuses again, “Liar.”

Kihyun laughs in his face. “Sure, say it as many times as you want, that’ll make it true.”

“Was that your mantra?” Changkyun snips, and Kihyun’s eyes flash and he shoves Changkyun off of him, too rough, it’s got to hurt, and Changkyun could fall but he grabs Kihyun’s shoulder instead and they both stumble. Changkyun’s gaze flickers down to Kihyun’s mouth, then off to the side — Kihyun follows the look and sees the oil-slick of the gun against the floor, and without thinking he dives to push it skittering out of Changkyun’s reach, and Changkyun goes to chase it and Kihyun grabs his leg and trips him, breaks his fall with his own body, rolls them until Changkyun is underneath.

This is more familiar, this position, Kihyun straddling Changkyun’s waist and pinning him down, but the look on Changkyun’s face is completely uncharted territory, enemy airspace, the great unknown. “Were you waiting there every night?” Kihyun teases.

Changkyun is not in the mood to be teased. When he starts to reach up, his hand skating along Kihyun’s thigh, Kihyun shoves his hand back down, but Changkyun is stronger, _so _much stronger, and reaches up and across, wrenches Kihyun by the other shoulder until Kihyun’s knees lose their purchase and he crumbles to the side, colliding hard with the cold marble floor. “Did you have fun in Jacksonville?” Changkyun says, outright mocking, as he pushes on top of him, braces an arm against his chest. “In Chicago? Did you?”

“Yes,” Kihyun lies, and Changkyun _snarls _at him, a noise so low and animal that it makes Kihyun’s hackles raise, his whole body electrified. He doesn’t have time to process the information that Changkyun knew exactly where he was all along because now Changkyun is pressing down against him — Changkyun is _hard _in his gorgeous linen pants, Kihyun hasn’t come in _seven months, _Kihyun can’t breathe for wanting him. Changkyun presses his face into Kihyun’s neck, takes in a deep lungful of his scent, bites him too hard underneath his jaw. “Changkyun—”

“How were you going to do it?” Changkyun asks, his lips at Kihyun’s throat. “Poison me? Stab me to death? That’s usually how this happens. Crime of passion. Takes a lot of hatred to kill someone with a knife. Do you really hate me that much?”

“No,” Kihyun says, struggling, and yanks Changkyun’s hair again to try and haul him up, but now Changkyun is back to mouthing at him, and Kihyun can feel his tongue and his eyesight goes blurry and he pushes up to try and escape his hold but Changkyun is unrelenting. “You really want to know?”

“Oh, I didn’t guess? I’ll keep trying. You could have staged my suicide. Or caused a gas leak, killed me in my sleep, that’d have been merciful. Maybe too nice for you, I think,” Changkyun speculates, sounding perversely cheerful, gloating over Kihyun’s growl of displeasure. “Pushed me into the Hudson while I was on a late-night walk, it’d look like I slipped. No, still too painless. Suffocation leaves traces. No guns in the house other than mine, I checked. Accidental overdose, maybe?”

“You’ve really thought about this,” Kihyun gasps. Changkyun slips down his body, mouth pressing over the fabric of his shirt, then bites down on his thigh, somehow between his legs so quickly, and not even Kihyun’s grip on his hair can make him stop as he pants against Kihyun’s hipbone. 

“Tell me,” Changkyun says, lifting his head, his wet, wet mouth. “Tell me how you were going to kill me.”

Instead, Kihyun shoves squarely in the middle of his chest with his knee, knocking him back and following after, coiled on top to keep him there. Changkyun’s head cracks against the marble and he makes a wounded noise but looks up at Kihyun with hungry eyes, so eager, so vicious, so hard that Kihyun can feel it in every part of him. _There wasn’t just one plan, _Kihyun wants to say. _I came up with so many. All I did was think about how I was going to kill you. I thought of plans where you died slowly, plans where you died quick. Simple, complicated, elegant, stupid, it didn’t matter, I couldn’t go through with a single one. I couldn’t do it. Not even the ones where I wouldn’t even have to touch you, even see you die. I wasn’t strong enough, I couldn’t do it, and all because of you._

But he doesn’t say that. Changkyun isn’t asking for an answer. So Kihyun picks a plan practically at random, one he didn’t consider for longer than five minutes, and says, “Staged home invasion.”

Changkyun’s eyes glimmer. He can feel, by now, that Kihyun is aching for him, and Kihyun can see the knowledge on his face, the self-satisfied way his mouth opens on a breath. “Really,” he says. “Sounds like fun.”

“Break in while you were sleeping,” Kihyun continues, and Changkyun’s hips flex and Kihyun nearly moans and loses it but manages to keep it together, rocking down to meet him. “Steal the valuables. Make some noise to wake you up, take you out when you came to check. The gun’s in a safety deposit box, I’m not stupid enough to keep it here.”

“Would you have stayed with me while I died of my wounds, or just left me again?” Changkyun quips, of course he’s fucking mocking him while Kihyun’s got his hands creeping up to the base of his throat, and he talks too much, he’s always talked too fucking much, and Kihyun leans down to kiss him, to seal their covenant, harsh, biting, shutting him up as best he can, until he tastes blood in their mouths and he doesn’t know whose it is. 

Changkyun’s hands tear at Kihyun’s shirt and Kihyun lets him. Their kiss has grown so sloppy that Kihyun can scarcely feel his lips, but the taste of him after so long is panacea, Kihyun can’t get enough, and his _cock, _Kihyun hears a distant whimpering as he ruts their bodies together and grasps for Changkyun’s hair, his face, his neck, his shoulders, and only belatedly does he realize the whimpering is coming from _him. _If Changkyun told him to right now, he would strip bare without hesitation, he would bend over, offer himself completely, let Changkyun do anything, anything he wants, and Changkyun breaks their kiss with a line of spit connecting their mouths and Kihyun’s heart jumps with anticipation, his trapped cock pulsing in his jeans, and Changkyun says—

“Tell me what you were going to wear to my funeral.”

“Vivienne Westwood, bespoke,” Kihyun replies immediately, and Changkyun is the first to moan, so breathless, eyes glazing over. “With a— with a chain closure across the waist. I already had my measurements sent over to the atelier — but I never followed up with them.”

“Shoes?” Changkyun prompts.

“Louboutins,” Kihyun scoffs. “I’m offended you even had to ask. Who do you think I am?”

Changkyun grins up at him, sharp and feral. “You tell me, sweetheart.”

Kihyun surges down to kiss him again. Biting, savage, he’ll never get enough. Changkyun rips open the closure of his jeans and shoves his hand inside, and when he palms over Kihyun’s dripping cock, he groans a choked-off _oh my God _into Kihyun’s mouth. Kihyun licks across his teeth, jerks his head to the side so he can pant against his jaw, then tug his earlobe with his lips, ravenous for the taste of his skin, he might pull Changkyun limb from limb with too much loving, he loves Changkyun so much that he could kill him here and now, and Changkyun — Changkyun is the _same, _Changkyun sees him and wants him still, just like this, wants him even more, and Changkyun is laughing as Kihyun’s cock jumps in his palm and saying, “Someone’s eager. Miss me?”

“Never,” Kihyun says and spits into his laughing mouth. Changkyun moans, his cheeks flaring red, his throat working up and down as he swallows, but Kihyun’s victory is Pyrrhic; Changkyun pulls his hand out of Kihyun’s jeans, and Kihyun unashamedly whines, nothing left of him but need, and ruts himself against Changkyun’s hips. “No— please, please—”

“Shouldn’t you be thanking me?” Changkyun says, breathless, pushing up into a loose diagonal, Kihyun supported on his chest as his other hand clutches the back of Kihyun’s thigh, fingers digging in. “I gave you everything you wanted, and this is how you treat me?”

He’s right, but Kihyun knows he doesn’t mean it, Changkyun’s heavy cock is so urgent between their bodies and Kihyun grabs for him blindly though it means he’s more likely to lose his balance, and he savors the way Changkyun groans in response. “Did Michelangelo thank his chisel?” Kihyun replies archly, just as out of breath, even worse off. “You were nothing but my tool. I used you to carve my life into the shape I wanted it to be.”

“You used me for all kinds of things,” Changkyun counters, rocks his thigh against Kihyun’s cock, and Kihyun gasps out and his elbow slips off the marble and Changkyun has to catch him, curling him in tight with his face pressed into his neck. “Was that it, then? You liked fucking me so much that killing me would be a waste? Say it.”

“No,” Kihyun says, simultaneously seeking to rub his cock against him and break free of his tight hold. 

“Admit it,” Changkyun insists, holding tighter. His hand is cradling the back of Kihyun’s head, fingers catching in his hair. Surprisingly gentle, given the circumstances and the acid in his tone. “That’s why you came back, too, couldn’t find anyone else to fill you up the way you like it, no matter how hard you tried—”

“That’s not true,” Kihyun snaps, so angry at the accusation that his eyes flare sharply with pricking pins of tears. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Name one other person,” Changkyun shrugs. Fucking casual, confident, utterly unwavering, and he throws Kihyun to the floor underneath him so he can brace himself above him, one light hand tracing along the edge of Kihyun’s chin, still so mocking. Kihyun tries to push away, slide out from under him, but Changkyun’s knee presses too hard into the meat of Kihyun’s thigh and Kihyun moans, half-pleasure, half-pain. He always forgets how much pain hurts, and he gives up his escape attempt after another moment of that too-strong pressure, glares up at Changkyun instead. “Just one other person who made you feel the way I did. Hm?”

Kihyun bares his teeth and bites Changkyun’s finger. “If yours was the last cock in the world, I still wouldn’t—”

But in a flash, Changkyun’s palm covers his mouth, grips it tight so he can’t even open up his jaw to bite again. He leans in close, watches the furious glint of Kihyun’s eyes as he fights to breathe, and tenderly, too sweetly, nudges the tips of their noses together. “Don’t lie to me again,” he murmurs, and it sounds like a threat.

He pulls his hand away and they sweep each other into a kiss so passionate it makes Kihyun’s whole being hunger, all entwined and urgent, frantic as they lick and frot and rub together. There’s nothing left to say, their bodies know their language well enough, and Kihyun’s ears ring with Changkyun’s desperate breathing and that hoarse, high way he moans when he’s getting close. Kihyun sinks his nails into Changkyun’s nape, prays that it leaves a mark, and Changkyun makes a broken little noise nearly like a sob muffled into Kihyun’s mouth and Kihyun clings to him, begs for mercy, and Changkyun’s fingers find bare flesh, and just that simple touch, practiced, crafted perfectly to fit all his most intimate places and seeking them out so expertly even after so much time apart, as if he’d never even left, sends Kihyun hurtling over the edge. His whole body shudders with it, tensed and uncontrollable, his sounds not recognizable as human, and he kisses Changkyun again and again and again, while Changkyun holds him far too tight as though he’s worried he’ll float away if left untethered, and before too long Changkyun goes still, his breathing hits a fevered pitch, and in another instant he collapses on top of him, his forehead pressed to Kihyun’s shoulder and their hands’ grips growing slack. 

Kihyun doesn’t know what to say, if Changkyun wants him to speak, if he’ll even be permitted to stay after this. For now, he takes what he can get, greedy as ever, and turns his head to nuzzle into Changkyun’s hair, to breathe him in. His eyes still prickle. Changkyun is alive, Changkyun is well. That’s all Kihyun ever wanted. He bows his head to press his lips to Changkyun’s temple, feels the pulse beat underneath, so warm and so alive. Should he talk first? He’s scared to. This is good, for now, just Changkyun’s warm weight on top of him and his breathing against the disheveled fabric of Kihyun’s shirt. Kihyun is even mostly unaware of the aches in his knees and shoulderblades, the soreness of his jaw, the pressure of the marble floor against his back. Changkyun is in his arms, and all is right.

Then Changkyun moves. “Did you lock the door?” he asks, neutral, nearly professional, and sits back from his position atop Kihyun’s thighs so he can look over to it; it’s not even fully closed, Kihyun had had other priorities upon coming inside. “Letting all the cold air in.”

Kihyun blinks, swallows. “I was—”

“Go lock up,” Changkyun says, moving easily to stand, shaking himself off. He doesn’t offer Kihyun a hand, already walking several paces away, and Kihyun, bemused and wary, pushes to his elbows, then his knees, then his feet, then crosses to close and lock the door; deadbolt and chain. 

Does that mean Changkyun isn’t kicking him out tonight? Kihyun is unsure of what to do with his suitcase but asking would make him seem weak. He looks back at Changkyun and catches quite a chill when he sees Changkyun with the gun again, but Changkyun is just picking it up to set it on the small table in the entryway. He catches Kihyun looking and smiles, his hand lingering, and Kihyun, with a flash of irritation, says, “Is it even loaded?”

Changkyun doesn’t answer, and his smile remains. “Follow me,” he says and heads for the stairs, leaving the gun where it is. 

All Kihyun can do is hope Chekhov was wrong. He makes the decision to leave his bag by the door and shadows Changkyun up the stairs, five steps behind, not wanting to stay too close or too far. Where is Changkyun leading him? The house still looks the same, he hasn’t redecorated or anything. The floors are so glossy, the ceilings are so high. There’s no place like home. But Kihyun’s feeling of sliding back into place is sabotaged by the strange way Changkyun is behaving, and Kihyun fears he might be being led into a trap. But it doesn’t matter, even if he is. Changkyun said to follow, and so Kihyun does.

Changkyun takes him to their bedroom and goes inside. “You should shower,” he says without turning to look at Kihyun. “I’m sure you’ve had a long day.”

It’s not untrue; there was an extensive bus, and then a train, and then that dismal walk. But it’s not what Kihyun had expected to hear, and he’s still not sure if this is a trap. His legs are unsteady, those aches he’d been ignoring making themselves present all at once, and a hot shower with the kind of water pressure he knows to expect from the master bathroom does sound divine, but he hesitates to leave Changkyun alone, too scared he’ll vanish if unobserved. So he stands there watching him, relearning the contours of his body from afar, rooted in place by fearful indecision and wanting desperately to hold him and be held, but not knowing how to get there, if he would even be permitted to approach. 

Changkyun must sense his reluctance, because he does finally turn, his face impassive. “Relax,” he says. “Go.”

His sudden taciturnity is jarring, especially after all that talking he’d just done. “Alright,” Kihyun says carefully. In the past Changkyun never insisted, Kihyun could openly disregard his requests as much as he saw fit, but there were many things Changkyun just did that Kihyun had never imagined him capable of. So Kihyun thinks it best not to push, and walks past Changkyun through the closet — with a not insignificant thrill — into the bathroom. 

It hasn’t changed in the slightest. Even his toothbrush remains by his sink. Kihyun is so charmed by the level of preserved detail, at such ease to be in a space he himself created, that he nearly forgets about the shower he’s meant to be taking. His soap, his razor, his home. But he catches sight of himself in the mirror above Changkyun’s sink and sees the red marks left by Changkyun’s mouth on his neck, sees the undeniable hollowness in his eyes and cheeks, and remembers.

The shower is even better than he thought it would be after a season of shitty hotels and Wonho’s vintage plumbing. Every cell of Kihyun’s body down to his marrow thanks him for the care, but he tries not to take his time, tries to keep it efficient, lathering up his hair and body with full bottles of his own preferred products, untouched for all these months. Just when he’d begun to get comfortable, the awareness of Changkyun mere yards away gnaws at him, a shard of glass barely large enough to see but sharp enough to hurt when stepped on, and he turns the water off and steps out onto the bathmat. His robe has been neatly hung back up onto its typical hook, flanking Changkyun’s. He presses his face into the plush terrycloth, expecting to smell some degree of having been forgotten, but it is fresh, washed recently. It’s as though this house is inhabited by Changkyun and a ghost, a memory of Kihyun forced to stay alive. Kihyun isn’t sure if it’s sweet or unsettling, but he puts the robe on nevertheless. 

He comes out of the bathroom. Suddenly he’s afraid again, he doesn’t want Changkyun to throw him onto the street, but he’s trying to prepare for the worst. Which guest room has the most comfortable bed? He tries to remember his careful furnishing. Second floor, north corner, he thinks. Changkyun is in bed already, the light by his side is on, he’s thumbing through the last few pages of a book. Withdrawn, so handsome. Still there. Unvanished. When he hears Kihyun’s footsteps, he looks up and sees Kihyun small and uncertain in the doorway, and he folds down the corner of his page and sets the book aside, looking evenly at him and not speaking, not yet.

_Here it comes, _Kihyun thinks, more frightened than ever, shivering not only from the chill of water evaporating on his skin. _My eviction notice, the warrant for my execution with it. _Is Changkyun expecting him to talk first? He’s too worried he’ll say the wrong thing. 

And then Changkyun smiles, something small and helpless, like he’s tired of fighting it. “Come to bed,” he says, and folds down the sheets on Kihyun’s side. 

Kihyun’s body moves by itself, pulling him towards his husband like a magnet to fine metal. No— no, he can’t, he shouldn’t, he needs to warn him, give him one final chance to escape. “If you let me— if you let me live with you,” he says, stumbling over the words, “you can’t annul the marriage on the grounds of fraud, voluntary cohabitation would make your case automatically invalid, you can’t—”

“Come to bed.”

Kihyun shudders out his next breath. Changkyun’s voice is steady, reproachful in its calmness, and Kihyun can feel his eyes on him as Kihyun strips out of the robe and pulls his pajamas on instead, folded neatly for him at the foot of the bed. Is this how it’s going to be? They’ll pretend nothing even happened, go back to how things were, no further questions asked? Kihyun feels almost indignant over that prospect, especially since it would mean all his introspection has gone to waste, but the warm wash of gratitude through his body supersedes any bruised pride. Changkyun is still watching him, and when Kihyun peeks, he finds his face amused, and Kihyun frowns, tugging the hem of his pajama shirt to straighten it. “What?”

“Nothing, just… look at you, being all noble,” Changkyun hums, back to that twisted level of glee he’d been at on the foyer floor. “You were going to _kill _me. Since when do you care about my well-being?”

Kihyun, against his best efforts and better judgment, goes red, as much from the shock of Changkyun being outright _mean_ as from the allegation. “I can’t give you an exact date of when it all began,” he huffs. The painfully tender way he’d felt upon finally seeing Changkyun in bed again, waiting for him, has dissipated all at once, and he gets into the bed with another irritated breath. Changkyun is still _smirking, _and Kihyun knocks a pillow a couple of times with his fist to get it how he likes it and scowls at him. “Look,” he starts, “this is all _very _difficult for me, so if you could—”

“Oh, this is perfect,” Changkyun sighs, sliding down so he’s fully horizontal. “You get to be the victim, you get to feel so sorry for yourself. But who’s going to feel sorry for _me? _My whole life was a lie!”

“I’ll feel sorry for you,” Kihyun says. “I will. I do.”

Changkyun rolls his head to the side to look up at him. Then he switches off the light. They’re breathing together in the dark, and Changkyun reaches for Kihyun’s hand. He finds it with surprising precision, but Kihyun hadn’t been expecting a touch and startles, which makes Changkyun laugh, low and quiet. Kihyun recognizes that Changkyun is sleepy, and the tenderness comes crashing back, Kihyun’s lungs burn with the effort of holding it at bay. Their fingers lace. Changkyun’s palm is warm, molded as if made around Kihyun’s. After a moment, Changkyun’s other hand moves until he’s holding Kihyun’s left in both of his, and at first Kihyun doesn’t understand, but then Changkyun presses his grip more deliberately, and the fourth fingers of their left hands slot together and he feels the click of metal against metal. 

Kihyun’s inhale falters and Changkyun holds their hands together tighter before pulling his left away again. The significance of the initial gesture is crushing, Kihyun can barely breathe under the weight, and the only thing stopping him from weeping is the rapid onset of fatigue, the past seven months somehow hitting him all at once. There was a certain kind of weariness that came with leaving home, with wandering, nomadic, through unknown steppes. Here, there is no need for Kihyun to adjust to a crackly AC unit or stiff sheets or the poorly-suppressed sounds of his best friend getting fucked in an upstairs bedroom. He’s alone with his husband, in their marital home, in a large and comfortable bed, and his husband wants him to stay. If they both die in their sleep tonight, Kihyun thinks, at least he’ll be dying happy, and they’ll still be holding hands in the afterlife, wherever they may meet again. 

He wakes to a bed half-empty. Rehabituated instantly to another body by his side, the drowsy awareness of the absence jerks him into full, panicked consciousness, and when he runs his hand over the divot in the sheets where Changkyun once was, the fabric has gone cold. He tries to listen for a sound, any indication of life somewhere in the house, but his heart is roaring in his ears, he can’t hear over his pulse and his sudden hysterical breathing, and though his body is slower to rouse, he stumbles out of bed and rushes to the stairs.

He can’t decide whether he should check the third floor or the first, but in the past when Changkyun was absent in the mornings he’d just gone to the kitchen to brood alone, so that’s where he begins his search; he holds onto the bannister as he runs down to the first floor, and a glance towards the front door reveals that his bag is still there, untouched. Another look, while Kihyun is already wasting time, confirms the absence of the gun from the entryway table. 

“Not again,” Kihyun mutters, but that’s good, at least that’s a sign of life. Heartened, Kihyun continues, but his panic returns, climbs up his throat and makes his cold hands shake, and only when he skids into the open entry to the kitchen and sees Changkyun sitting inoffensively at the island with a cup in one hand and his phone in the other does he let out the breath he’d been too scared to release for fear it would come out a scream. 

Changkyun hears him, or sees him out of his peripherals. He looks up from his phone with a grin that can only be described as shit-eating, takes an innocent sip of his coffee. “Good morning,” he hums.

“Good morning,” Kihyun says stiffly, vibrating with rage.

“What’s the matter?” Changkyun asks. Playing dumb, he sets the mug down and presses a hand to his heart, eyes going cartoonishly wide. “You— oh, _no_. You didn’t think I left in the middle of the night with no warning, did you? Completely out of the blue? My goodness, wouldn’t that be awful!”

So it turns out Kihyun is the sort of person to cry when angry; his eyes sting involuntarily and he swallows around the sudden lump in his throat, fists balling at his sides. Since when does Changkyun tease like this? What else has changed while Kihyun has been away? He must be making quite the face, because Changkyun’s grin drops into a far gentler smile and he holds out his left hand to him, which Kihyun steadfastly ignores. 

“Too soon? Don’t look at me like that,” Changkyun says and again extends his hand. “I made breakfast. Come sit with me. How did you sleep?”

Kihyun is getting whiplash, but he reluctantly takes Changkyun’s hand and allows Changkyun to draw him in, his loose and easily-escaped grip guiding Kihyun to stand between his knees and lean in for a small morning kiss. Despite his rage, Kihyun can’t help but melt into him, hands going onto Changkyun’s shoulders and his head tilting to the side to fit into the kiss, but then he frowns, leaning away to look at him. “I slept fine. What do you mean, _you _made breakfast?”

“I learned how to cook,” Changkyun shrugs. “What else was I supposed to do? The frittata’s in the oven. Check out our new tea maker, by the way.”

Kihyun tries not to feel giddy over his usage of the word _our_ and leaves Changkyun’s confinements to go see what Changkyun is fucking talking about. A peek inside the oven reveals what looks to be an expertly-made frittata, crispy and aromatic, and the tea maker on the countertop is sleek and covered in buttons; as Kihyun watches, fascinated, a little internal device lifts a basket full of tea leaves out of the water to ensure the tea doesn’t overbrew. “It’s nice,” he says belatedly. 

Changkyun makes a pleased sound in assent and Kihyun hears him get out of his bar stool to join Kihyun by the counter. “Why don’t you go sit, and I’ll serve you,” he suggests. “Then we can talk.”

Ah. Kihyun had been on the point of relaxation, but now he’s drawn tight as a bowstring again, a dual-ended arrow pointed both at archer and at target. Not trusting himself to speak, he goes over to the breakfast table — can’t even remember the last time he acquiesced to this many of Changkyun’s requests in a row — and has a seat in his usual chair, and soon Changkyun brings him a slice of frittata and a steaming cup of tea. Kihyun doesn’t reflexively smile or thank him, just accepts, and Changkyun pulls out his own usual chair and sits, too, his coffee still abandoned in the kitchen. For some reason, that discomfits Kihyun greatly, and he glances back over his shoulder to see the mug. “Don’t you want your coffee?”

“Oh. It’s fine,” Changkyun says with an easy shrug. He must have been up for a while already; Kihyun remembers that it takes him at least an hour to return to that level of alertness. At least he has his glasses on, which makes him look so much less threatening — and Kihyun realizes with belated alarm that he does, in fact, feel threatened. 

That is unacceptable. He has to regain control of the situation somehow. “I’ll go get it for you,” he offers, beginning to rise out of his chair, but Changkyun raises his eyebrows at him, a gesture clearly borrowed from Kihyun’s own playbook, and, hating every second of this, Kihyun sinks back down. 

Changkyun smiles. “Contrition suits you,” he says. “You have nothing to worry about, Kihyun. When have I ever done anything to make you mistrust me?”

“You have a _gun,” _Kihyun says archly. “You outright said you got it _specifically _in case I came back.”

“What’s your point? I don’t need it anymore,” Changkyun says. “You can come with me to sell it back, if it means that much to you.”

Kihyun narrows his eyes at him and slides the plate across the table. “I want to see you eat this first.”

That makes Changkyun laugh, and Kihyun tries not to get distracted by the lovely sound of it, holds instead onto his anger and frustration. Is this a joke to him? After everything Kihyun put himself through to come home? Changkyun spins the fork in his fingers, slices off a piece of the frittata, and bites. “I waited for you,” he says once he’s swallowed. “Went through all five stages of grief, twice. I’m never going to let you out of my sight again.”

He returns the plate to Kihyun, and Kihyun, stunned into silence, takes a sip of his tea. Changkyun is watching him with his head tilted slightly to the side and his eyes amused behind his glasses, and as Kihyun takes his first mouthful of the frittata (it’s expertly made, well-spiced, delicious), he leans back slightly in his chair and says, “So let’s talk. I’d like for you to be honest, and I don’t think that’s too much to ask in exchange for my— _understanding, _let’s say. No, I’m not blackmailing you, I’m just saying. Surely at this point, being honest is the least you can do.”

“Fine,” Kihyun says. 

“That’s all you have to say about that?” Changkyun says, incredulous. “Fine? If you want this to be like pulling teeth the whole way—”

“Just say what you have to say,” Kihyun interrupts. He sets the fork down on the table, his anger returning with a vengeance. “Ask what you have to ask. You don’t have to play with your food before you skewer it.”

“Kihyun,” Changkyun says with a roll of his eyes. “Why are you such a pessimist? I told you, there’s nothing to worry about. I’m about to forgive you and ask you to stay permanently so we can live happily ever after— please, for the love of God, for once in your life, _relax.”_

He says it like it’s easy. Still, a little like it’s a joke, and Kihyun isn’t sure if he likes this entirely new side to Changkyun, all this mocking even though Kihyun is tender like a bruise, salt in the wound, but his words act as a balm and Kihyun can’t help the way he perks up. All he can hope for is that it’s not too obvious on his face. “Very well,” he says once he’s taken a moment to gather his reactions into a neatly packaged bundle. “Go ahead.”

The expression on Changkyun’s face is not unlike the way he’d looked at Kihyun when the waiter had shown him to their table, windowside at Per Se. He’s very nearly lost for words, but then he shakes his head to clear it and, after a small gesture to encourage Kihyun to keep eating if he’s hungry, he says, “I’m sure you know that I have questions. But I don’t necessarily need, or even want, for you to answer them. If you’d like to tell me, I’d love to hear, but this isn’t an interrogation. I just want to talk. Besides, you’re not as good at hiding as you think you are. It’s like you _wanted _to be found.”

Is he talking about Kihyun’s sojourns away from home, or the years Kihyun spent repressing his true emotions? “I didn’t try as hard as I could have,” Kihyun permits cautiously, the possible double meaning maintained. 

“I know,” Changkyun smiles. “That always gave me hope, in a way. That if you wouldn’t let me find you, at least you’d come to me yourself. And I was right!”

Kihyun, displeased with his level of smugness and with the continued ambiguity of meaning, takes a prissy sip of his tea. “How long are you going to rest on your laurels?”

“God, _forever,_” Changkyun sighs. “You’ll never live this one down. Are you kidding? You were going to murder me, but then you loved me too much! My ego is officially bulletproof.”

“That’s not why,” Kihyun says, going red. Despite Changkyun’s insistence that this isn’t an interrogation, he feels uncomfortably like he’s underneath a microscope, too visible too close too quick. 

Changkyun is unrelenting, though he doubtless sees Kihyun’s distress. “I thought we agreed you weren’t going to lie to me anymore,” he says, and leans across the table to steal Kihyun’s mug for a sip of his tea.

“You are insufferable,” Kihyun huffs.

“But you love me for it,” Changkyun says, blasé. “Can’t scare me anymore, honey. If you haven’t killed me yet, you won’t kill me now.”

At this rate, Kihyun wouldn’t be so sure if he were Changkyun. But he can’t deny that it _is _thrilling to discover the full extent of Changkyun’s perversity. He’s not sure why he hadn’t expected Changkyun to be very sexually excited by Kihyun having stalked him and tricked him with murderous intent; he always has been a capital-R Romantic. If anything, it makes him impossibly even more attractive, and Kihyun’s cheeks remain rosy as he steals the mug right back. “Is that all you wanted to say?”

“You wish,” Changkyun says. “By the way, if you have anything you want to ask me, _I’m _an open book.”

There’s too much, and Kihyun doesn’t even know where to begin, faced with the brave new world that is a post-truth Changkyun. He takes a measured bite of his frittata, gulps a mouthful of his tea, and looks at the tablecloth instead of at his husband, since it’s easier. “When did you know? Or—” And his heart seizes up with terror, terror that not only has he been had, but he’s been outwitted more thoroughly than he ever thought possible— “did you always?”

“Did I always know that you were planning my murder?” Changkyun clarifies and waits for Kihyun’s small, miserable nod to continue. “No, I did not. I’m not _that _smart, I can’t literally read your mind, as much as I might like to. But I did always know there was more to your story than you let me read.”

“Please,” Kihyun says through gritted teeth. “Would it kill you to avoid metaphors? Just this once.”

“Better the metaphors than my soulmate,” Changkyun says innocently. Which, to Kihyun’s chagrin, has the desired effect, Kihyun instantly flushing scarlet again and retreating into himself. 

“That’s a very big word,” Kihyun mumbles. “Be careful how you use it.”

Changkyun is laughing again, but not unkindly, quite the opposite. Kihyun still can’t look at him, even out of the corner of his eye is far too much. “Kihyun,” Changkyun says, so softly, as though he, too, hasn’t dared to say his name out loud these past few months, so softly that Kihyun’s heart, already pushed far beyond its limits, might actually break. “You said last night that you were sorry for me. Don’t be. I’m so lucky— I get to fall in love with you twice.”

Kihyun covers his eyes with his hand. Changkyun saying things like that is as acutely painful as when he’s mocking, and Kihyun can handle neither. But Changkyun, a merciful god in this instance, continues in order to spare Kihyun from excess emotion: “All I meant was— I could tell that you were hiding _something. _That you weren’t letting me in all the way. And that was one of the reasons I liked you so much right from the beginning, that air of mystery.”

Kihyun can’t help himself, he snorts a laugh from behind his hand. That’s one way of putting it, dismissing his elaborate charade as nothing but an air of mystery. He can’t even feel betrayed that Changkyun was interested in him as a result of the thrill of the chase, always hoping Kihyun would finally let him see behind the curtain; maybe it’s a good thing Kihyun waited this long. _Fuck, _Kihyun thinks with startling clarity. _We just might be able to make this thing work._

“But I never suspected that that’s what it was,” Changkyun adds. “I mean, I thought maybe— with the, with the sex, I thought that was it. But clearly I was still missing a few pieces of the puzzle.”

“Clearly,” Kihyun agrees, still smothering a smile. How cute, Changkyun is too shy to say directly what he means. He lowers his hand from his face and finds the hint of ruddiness on Changkyun’s cheeks, which heartens him even further, and he finishes off the frittata on his plate and curls both palms around his mug of tea. His next look up at Changkyun is very nearly coy, testing the waters, and the dimples carved into Changkyun’s cheeks are reward enough.

“Come,” Changkyun says, fidgeting until he stands, and extends a hand to Kihyun. “Let’s go lie down by the fireplace, I’ve had it on all morning. Aren’t you cold?”

“Not really,” Kihyun says, but goes with him anyway. Changkyun snags some cushions from the couch and Kihyun makes a detour through the kitchen to retrieve Changkyun’s coffee, and they meet again in the living room, Changkyun settling on the rug and patting the space next to him. When Kihyun holds his mug out to him, his eyes go all alight, absolutely radiant, and Kihyun permits him a tiny smile and sits down by his side.

Changkyun looks into the fireplace and Kihyun looks at Changkyun. Watches as he lifts the coffee mug to his lips and takes a swallow, but the proximity to the hot liquid causes the lower half-inch of his glasses to steam up, and Kihyun, overcome with a protective instinct so powerful he thinks he could lift a car if the situation called for it, leans his shoulder against Changkyun’s. The warmth of Changkyun’s body bleeds into Kihyun’s arm, and Kihyun turns his head to look in the same direction as the flames lick and jump along the firewood. 

“When I was very little,” Changkyun murmurs, “there was one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world.”

Kihyun hums, nearly hypnotized by the motion of the fire. He could so easily fall back asleep, lulled by the crackling, the warmth, Changkyun so steady by his side. “What’s that?” he prompts, as quietly as Changkyun had spoken.

“My very own pet tiger,” Changkyun says. 

He still sounds somber, but the concept is so ridiculous that Kihyun exhales an entertained breath through his nose. “I thought you wanted to be a star athlete.”

“That, too,” Changkyun agrees, after a moment’s hesitation to process that Kihyun remembers a tiny detail mentioned off-hand two and a half years ago. “But the tiger was my priority. I asked every birthday and Christmas. It could have been a lion, honestly, or even a shark, or a bear. But I would have preferred a tiger. Something so dangerous and powerful that it could kill anyone with a single blow. And it would be all mine. In a little cage. I would keep the only key, and let it out when I chose, and it would never harm _me. _We would be the very best of friends.”

He takes a breath and turns his head, presses his shoulder more securely to Kihyun’s. “Thank you,” he says, so soft. “I never thought I’d really get it.”

Kihyun leans in to kiss him, and his cup of tea falls from his other hand and soaks into the carpet. Neither of them notices.

After an hour wasted in each other, after Changkyun has been thoroughly kissed as punishment for that level of objectification, after an extremely silly conversation the likes Kihyun of which would never have permitted before while Changkyun sucked love bite after love bite into Kihyun’s neck (“So you missed me?” “I already told you that I did.” “But did you really, _really _miss me?” “Don’t push your fucking luck.”), Changkyun pulls away with a wet noise and protests, “Wait, no, I had actual things I needed to tell you, and you keep distracting me!”

Kihyun, unapologetic, just blinks at him languidly. The carpet will doubtless be ruined, but what does it matter? He and Changkyun can just replace it. “Tell me, then.”

“I have conditions,” Changkyun says, giggling as Kihyun makes, once again, to slide his hand up Changkyun’s shirt to pinch him. “Stop it, this is serious! I have conditions for you being allowed to stay.”

“Oh, you’re allowing me, are you,” Kihyun says.

“Yes,” Changkyun insists. “I’m the one with all the power.”

“Is that so,” Kihyun purrs, but before he can really sink his teeth in, Changkyun squirms away more finally and sits up to fix him with a serious look. 

“Let me say this, Kihyun. And then we can do whatever we want to each other. But I want to make sure we understand a few things first. Okay? Will you let me get this out?” 

Kihyun glowers, but retreats, curled up and watching him intently. The buoyant feeling inside his chest can’t be sustained, he can’t just _win, _that isn’t how this works, but it’s early yet to sign his death sentence. “Proceed,” he says. 

Changkyun gets temporarily distracted, going all dimpled and sentimental over Kihyun’s tendencies towards the megalomaniacal, but steels himself again and says: “So. My conditions. You’re allowed to stay, I want you to stay with me, I want that more than anything. But things have to change. I don’t want our life to be exactly how it was before, because I wasn’t always happy, and I know you weren’t, either. This isn’t an ultimatum, and of course this isn’t legally binding, but I trust that you’ll stick to these conditions, and if there’s anything that I can do to make your life more pleasant, or to be a better husband to you now that you’ve chosen to come back, please just tell me.”

“Just spit it out already,” Kihyun sighs, affecting impatience though his heart is beating faster than ever before — there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for Changkyun, he thinks, if asked. Of course there are things that would be an inconvenience, and Kihyun will complain every step of the way, but at this point, Changkyun has more than earned it.

“First,” Changkyun says, taking a steadying breath, “I don’t want you to lie to me anymore. I don’t know what, exactly, you lied to me about before— if there were things in your past that you invented, or just reactions to things that I said— but I want that to stop. Can you do that for me?”

It’s a big ask. But Kihyun knows how necessary it is. He thinks it might not be so bad, to tell Changkyun the truth. “Yes,” he says.

Changkyun, visibly bolstered and pleased, barrels onwards. “Second, I want you to be honest with me.”

“That’s the same thing,” Kihyun complains.

“No,” Changkyun insists, putting a finger over Kihyun’s lips to silence him, then jerking his hand away when Kihyun playfully nips, “it’s different. Listen. Not telling lies is one thing, but I think there’s a big difference between saying something that’s false and lying by omission. So I want you to be honest, and not evade and not spin things or bend the truth a little bit. I want you to be honest. You don’t need to hide anything from me, not anymore. I want to know it all. Can you do that for me?”

An even bigger ask, still, and Kihyun has to take longer to think about what this all means, but after a moment, he nods and again says, “Yes.”

“And third,” Changkyun continues, his eyes on the finish line, “I want you to get some therapy.”

“_No,” _Kihyun says immediately.

“Okay, then you can leave!” Changkyun retorts. They glare at each other for a long instant, and Changkyun doesn’t back down and shrink away how he always used to do; unflinching, he meets Kihyun’s gaze, not afraid at all of him anymore. “I’m serious. Kihyun, I just want you to be happy, and I know there are things that you won’t want to tell me that you _need _to get out anyway. There are also things that I can’t help you with, no matter how much I love you. You need therapy. And I think you know it, too.”

“I know no such thing,” Kihyun mutters.

Changkyun _still _won’t back down. “If you absolutely hate it after— can we say five sessions? If after five sessions it’s still no help, then we can reevaluate,” he says. “If you would prefer to do couples therapy instead—”

“_Fuck _no—”

“—that’s something I would be open to as well,” Changkyun says. “But this is non-negotiable. Kihyun. Can you do that for me?” He pauses, and before Kihyun can really take some time to think about it, he softens and amends, “Or, rather, can you do that for you?”

Kihyun stares at him, unimpressed. “Well, I’ll tell you right now that I won’t be doing it for me,” he says. “But—” He huffs, whines about it briefly, tries to pout, but Changkyun won’t be moved, just watches him serenely. His newfound confidence is terribly, appallingly sexy, and Kihyun scowls and reluctantly says, “But I can do it. Yes.”

“There we go,” Changkyun says and leans in for a sweet little kiss. “That’s all I wanted to say. Thank you.”

Somehow, it’s as easy as that. Kihyun can’t decide if Changkyun is a genius or an idiot for forgiving him so lightly — but he supposes he’s had time to work through all his other feelings in the months Kihyun was gone. Maybe he’s repressing the rest of his betrayal, maybe it’ll all come crashing back down over their heads in another week, but for _once, _just once in his life, Kihyun would like to live in the moment. No future, very little past. Just him and Changkyun, the here and the now, kissing by the fireplace as Changkyun looks past Kihyun’s defenses and likes what he sees. 

Kihyun’s not exactly sure what’s meant to happen next from there. Ostensibly, just like Changkyun had said, they live happily ever after. And it’s a pretty good start, Kihyun curled up on Changkyun’s chest while they kiss, his hands firmly ensconced in his soft hair, Changkyun’s arms looped tight around his waist. But Kihyun is wary around too much honest joy, it’s never stayed with him for long — he was hesitant to let himself even _dream _of this, and so he can’t quite take it all for granted, just accept that he really _does _get to win this time. Too good to be true, but in a very different way than before. And even though Changkyun is kissing him, he still seems somehow distracted, and finally Kihyun pulls away and says, “Didn’t you have questions for me?”

“Oh, right,” Changkyun says. “Nothing urgent. I’m just curious about you.” His bravado falters quickly, and he reaches to brush Kihyun’s hair back out of his face; it’s gotten marginally long during his isolation. “Where were you the past seven months? Like, I know _where _you were, but— where were you? _How _were you? What happened?”

Unspoken is _why did you come back, _and that’s not one Kihyun would have wanted to answer, anyway. “Well, I guess you know I was in Florida, and Chicago, and Louisville,” he lists, “and then I stayed with Wonho for a while, he helped a lot. I was…” _Be honest, _he remembers, and sighs, leans his head down to rest in the crook of Changkyun’s shoulder so he doesn’t have to show his face. “I wasn’t doing very well. Before I got to Wonho’s, I was in hotels, and I didn’t talk to anyone or go outside or do anything, I just stayed in bed and… brooded. My vague plan was to pull out as much cash as I could from my bank account, then maybe get a job somewhere, start over completely.”

“But something happened?” Changkyun prompts softly, and Kihyun can even hear it in his voice that Changkyun’s heart is going out to him, devastated at the mental image of Kihyun alone and miserable in dingy hotel rooms across Americana as Kihyun was to picture Changkyun alone and miserable here. “I was really surprised when I saw you ended up at Wonho’s.”

He wants Kihyun to ask him how he knew exactly where he was; that much is very clear. But Kihyun doesn’t take the bait yet, just sighs and reluctantly admits, “I was an idiot, and I got kind of robbed. Only kind of! Don’t panic. I wasn’t paying attention to my bag, and someone took it. That’s where all my cash was.”

Changkyun isn’t saying anything, and Kihyun belatedly realizes that he might be mad, since that was his money, after all. Kihyun lifts his head from his shoulder to look at him and finds him at war with worry, and Kihyun, amused rather than annoyed by his concern, drops a kiss to his cheek. “Sorry,” he says, but it’s a hollow apology, quickly qualified: “I’m sure I needed the money more than you did, so it was worse for me.”

Changkyun shakes his head, his eyes still full of sympathy. “How much was it? Just out of curiosity.”

Kihyun winces. Maybe he is mad. “About fifty thousand?”

“Oh.” Changkyun, never even tense, relaxes into dismissiveness right away. “We made that much _yesterday, _honey, don’t even worry about it.”

Kihyun waits for the rush of pleasure he’s accustomed to feeling when Changkyun makes such casual, lazy reference to his unfathomable wealth, but when after a moment it still hasn’t come, he blinks and wonders if he should be concerned. In its place flows a different feeling, something soft around the edges and too shy to be observed directly, the sickening realization that he would love Changkyun if he had nothing. Penniless and poor, they could share a shoebox and beg for scraps, and Kihyun would still love him. Fuck. To distract himself from the way his stomach turns, less butterflies and more barracuda, he gives Changkyun a weak smile and says, “Fine, I’ll bite. How did you know where I was?” Similarly unspoken: _why didn’t you come looking? _He thinks he knows the answer, anyway. It was important for them to spend some time apart. Had they found each other again sooner, maybe Changkyun, not quite ripened in his forgiveness, would not have been so kind, and then Kihyun wouldn’t be able to have this. Changkyun smiles at the question, too, and Kihyun judges it safe to lie back down, confident that Changkyun can handle the weight of Kihyun atop him, and if he can’t, he’s confident that Changkyun, this new, brave Changkyun, will simply ask him to move. 

“Your laptop,” Changkyun says, smug, and Kihyun groans a soft _of course _into his neck. “You turned all tracking off on your phone, but I logged in with your Apple ID to the Find my MacBook site, and there you were. Thought it was glitching when I saw you were in _Jacksonville.”_

“It felt like a glitch,” Kihyun agrees glumly. It would be easy, now, to complain about how terrible the hotels were, the sticky salty air, and then the unfeeling mimicry of Chicago, his lowest points in Louisville looking over the business end of a bridge, but he has to save _some_ things, or he fears Changkyun may run out of questions. Attempting to lighten the mood, not wanting Changkyun to pity him too extensively beyond what Kihyun feels he deserves, he teases, “You didn’t hire a private detective? I thought that would be your first course of action.”

But Changkyun isn’t grinning along. “No,” he says, evenly. “I didn’t. I didn’t want anyone to know that you had left, so I kept it to myself.”

“What?” Kihyun frowns, pulling back, sitting up and pulling Changkyun to sit, too, concerned about crushing him regardless of his lack of reaction. “You didn’t tell a single person?”

Changkyun shakes his head. “Did you?”

“Not— not strangers,” Kihyun says. Now he feels strangely inadequate in his suffering, and even worse for Changkyun. “Not even Minhyuk. Only Wonho and Shownu. I couldn’t tell them everything, but I also couldn’t just demand to crash with them without _some _kind of explanation. Oh, _fuck, _I forgot to tell Wonho I got back okay— ugh, I’ll do it later, remind me?”

“Okay,” Changkyun says, a smile flickering in the corner of his mouth. “Did you have a good time staying with them?”

“God, no,” Kihyun says, then thinks better of it. “Well. They were very kind to me. Wonho especially. I learned a lot about myself there. Don’t laugh,” he adds savagely, defensive all over again.

“I wasn’t going to,” Changkyun says. “Let’s pick out an Edible Arrangement for them this week. I’m really glad they could help you when I couldn’t.”

And when no one was helping him, apparently. Did he really keep it all a secret? Why? That seems like unnecessary torture, and Kihyun doesn’t know how to show the kind of affection he wants to show, so he twines a finger in a strand of Changkyun’s hair and gives it a little pull. “You didn’t even have Jooheon come and stay with you? Even if you weren’t going to tell him why I was gone, just for, I don’t know— companionship?”

Changkyun is smiling when he shakes his head this time around. “No, of course not.”

“Why is that an _of course?” _Kihyun presses, befuddled.

“Come on,” Changkyun says, smile widening. “Because I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

Kihyun goes rigid and makes a strangled noise. Had he really been so obvious? Changkyun really _had _seen him all along — his self-loathing, his fear of rejection, had all been needless. Changkyun leans in to kiss him on the cheek and says that Kihyun is so cute, and Kihyun just goes red instead of going for his jugular. 

“I stayed home a lot,” Changkyun murmurs, hugging Kihyun closer in his lap. Kihyun had forgotten the extent of how much he loves holding court there, but he’s rectifying his mistake in full force, refusing to move even for an inch ever since they assumed this position. “Sometimes I went to work, but I didn’t want to miss you, just in case you came back while I was gone. I cleaned. I fired Lena and watched a lot of Ina Garten instead. I lived life as though you’d just gone out for a few minutes, like you were in the city and on your way back home, I expected you any minute now.”

“How does the gun factor into that?” Kihyun mutters, squirming both from the tight grip and all this sweet emotion, but Changkyun is unmoved, Kihyun feels the way he smiles against his collarbone. 

“Can you really blame me? I got it somewhere in September, after I saw you heading north. I wasn’t about to lock the window like Peter Pan’s mother, but better safe than sorry,” he says, his smile fading into thoughtfulness. “The gesture mattered to me. A way of showing you that I was serious. Of course I could never hurt you, Kihyun. I really did go through all the stages of grief, but I always settled right back into denial. _He’ll be back tomorrow, _I always thought. I’ll wake up and he’ll be home. I was obsessed— couldn’t stand to be out of the house for longer than six hours, because what if, oh God, what if? What if you came home and I wasn’t there? At least I knew you were out there, somewhere in the world. I hoped you were thinking of me. I hoped you could feel me thinking of you. I hoped it was enough to bring you back home.”

“It was,” Kihyun breathes, and it’s not even a lie.

Finding a daily routine to settle into now that avoiding Changkyun is no longer the goal is quite the elaborate process. But Kihyun doesn’t have to go about it by himself, and they figure out as a couple what their limit is for daily interactions so they don’t begin to get on each other’s nerves too badly. Holed up together in their murder mansion, and for the first time ever, Kihyun doesn’t resent any aspect of the isolation — neither his fear that Changkyun is harboring resentment, nor Changkyun himself, his once-involuntary satellite. They do a lot of _cuddling, _to Kihyun’s feigned disgust at first but, invariably after about five minutes, eventual open enjoyment, and they go to get Kihyun’s pictures developed and Changkyun shows Kihyun the recipes he tweaked over the last few months and, while looking for the match to a sock fresh out of the laundry, Kihyun finds the note he left for Changkyun — laminated, kept safe from any weathering. He asks Changkyun if he went and got it done at an Office Depot or if he did it at home, and Changkyun takes him to the garage and shows him the laminator he bought for one use only. Changkyun isn’t scared of him at all; not that he should be, but it’s nearly funny how unafraid he is. He takes liberties with words and actions, constantly pressed up close against Kihyun’s side and kissing his cheek and calling him adorable, and Kihyun snaps at him to try and get him to fuck off, to which Changkyun always croons something to the effect of, “But you love me,” which Kihyun, unfortunately, can no longer deny. Kihyun often finds it difficult to believe that his life isn’t a dream. He apologizes to Changkyun for missing their anniversary, and Changkyun apologizes in turn for missing Kihyun’s birthday, and they agree to make it up to each other somehow, at a time unspecified. Sometimes they’re polite with each other — Changkyun gives Kihyun his space, even if only for a few hours, the house is certainly big enough. Mainly Kihyun isn’t sure how to act, what to do, pretending or overcompensating is his reflex, he wasn’t kidding when he told Wonho that he didn’t know what was left of him in the absence of the persona he’d crafted for Changkyun. But Changkyun is patient as ever, never pushes, rarely teases, these days. Seems to have gotten it all out of his system that first full day. He does get bold and ask Kihyun for a more specific timeline: when did Kihyun know his plan was going to fail? When did his false love grow real? Kihyun declines to answer. Some mystery must be maintained, after all, since apparently that’s what Changkyun likes. 

Changkyun is so much smarter than Kihyun ever gave him credit for. One night, when they’re in bed but not quite willing to say goodbye to each other in favor of sleep just yet, Changkyun confesses that another way he knew something was up with Kihyun was Kihyun’s own face — apparently, he moved the muscles therein differently when he was being sincere versus when he was faking it. “You have so many tells,” Changkyun says fondly, and Kihyun tries to smother Changkyun with a pillow to keep him from flaying Kihyun all the way down to the nerveroot, but he doesn’t try very hard and Changkyun is breathless with laughter when he pulls Kihyun against him. The enormity of the _feeling _Kihyun has never ceases to amaze. He hadn’t realized how much he was keeping locked away. At times he worries it’ll consume him, flames licking up the sides of the fragile structure keeping him upright, but Changkyun doesn’t seem to fear the fire, and Kihyun follows his cues, unsteady walking in his footsteps. He never thought Changkyun could teach him anything, but here he is, learning. He’s barely even bored. If familiarity is meant to breed contempt, Kihyun isn’t quite sure where his wires got this badly crossed. 

“I want to take you out,” Changkyun says the subsequent morning, nonchalant, and Kihyun looks up from his magazine, still working through all the issues of the New Yorker he’d missed. “We haven’t been out in a while. What do you think? Dinner and a show?”

“Depends on the dinner and the show,” Kihyun says. He has no feelings about being invited on a date; surely he’s entitled to dates, surely it comes with the territory of being married. Even still, he can’t deny the beginnings of warmth in his midsection, because this will be their first outing as a _real _couple. Which would matter to him if he were the sort of person to put stock into that sort of thing, and— evidently that’s the sort of person that he is, too. “Got anything in mind?”

Changkyun beams, nonchalance vanishing immediately, always the approval junkie, even now. “The Met’s got _La Bohème, _and we could eat at Per Se first. For old times’ sake?”

Kihyun rolls his eyes. “You are _so_ corny.”

“That’s not a no, which means it’s a glowing yes by your standards,” Changkyun hums. “I’ll make the call.”

“But I hate _La Bohème,_” Kihyun complains — though he knows it’s all in vain. “What else is on?”

Changkyun tosses him his newspaper and Kihyun flips through to the relevant section, momentarily distracted by an article about an insider trading/money laundering scheme being run out of Chelsea, and he absently murmurs, “You should take a look at this,” before finding the list of current theatrical offerings. A musical or anything non-Shakespearean is out of the question, and when it comes to the Met, they’ve got _The Barber of Seville _and _Fidelio _but both of those aren’t until the end of the month and Kihyun doesn’t want to wait that long, but there’s something by Prokofiev, _The Fiery Angel, _on now, and he won’t have to sit through Changkyun doubtless weeping over Mimi’s tragic and wholly deserved fate. “_The Fiery Angel— _ringing any bells? Anything but _La Bohème,_” Kihyun says and hands the newspaper back.

“Oh, yeah, that’s a crazy symbolist novel,” Changkyun says. His smile is rather knowing, which is never a good sign. “You’ll love it. This weekend?”

“It’s not like I have any other plans,” Kihyun sighs, but Changkyun sees right through him, smiling wider and leaning across the breakfast table for a kiss. It’s still a small victory, though, with the choice of opera, so Kihyun is pleased with himself and permits more kisses, and naturally they get distracted, but not for long; Changkyun has reservations to make. 

And now they have something to look forward to, a nice break in their blissful, fraught monotony. The feeling Kihyun has is not dissimilar to his nervousness preceding their first date, but of course this is so much more significant, their first real date, a coming-out into society, baring themselves before the eyes of the world as daring to love each other fully. With the restaurant called and the private box at the Met booked, Kihyun spends the rest of the afternoon trying to teach Changkyun how to tie a bowtie, and of course Changkyun continues to fail miserably and Kihyun begins to suspect that maybe he’s exaggerating his ineptitude for the sake of giving Kihyun this win, too, and tires of this exercise and stomps off upstairs in a huff. Changkyun plies him with sweet words and offers to take him up to the Finger Lakes this week, and finally Kihyun allows him in, and they make out on the chaise for a solid hour. It’s revolting. Kihyun keeps waiting for the police to kick down his door, or for the roof to crash down over his head, but it hasn’t happened yet. He imagines this is what it’s like to live in California. Living on borrowed time, just waiting for the Big One. There’s only so much seismic preparation he can do before the tectonic plates shift and destroy it all, his whole bitterly fought-for paradise. But Changkyun makes it difficult for him to live in anything but the moment, and the time goes from borrowed to his.

Saturday afternoon, they take the train into Manhattan. Kihyun complains the whole drive to the station — “What’s the point in taking the train if we’re just going to _drive _to the station?” — and very nearly the whole time they’re on the train — “This is so inefficient, God, we could have been there an hour ago already,” although the first-class subscription Changkyun maintains means they’re in a quiet, clean train car, practically deserted, and even Kihyun runs out of gripes forty-five minutes in while Changkyun, patient, sits in silence and waits for him to finish — but once they hit the city, transferring to the subway, his complaints dry up. This is the city where he and Changkyun feigned romance for the first time; now, masks off, they get to try again. The parallels are astounding, and the ache of anxiety somewhere behind his sternum only worsens the closer they get to Per Se. Kihyun remembers acting nervous, nearly three years ago, forcing himself to pantomime the motions of first-date jitters, but now there is no artifice in the way he holds onto Changkyun’s arm as the waiter shows them to their table, and he’s even reluctant to sit across from him — he would have preferred to sit adjacently. Changkyun looks handsome in his bowtie, and he says Kihyun looks equally handsome in his, but Kihyun doubts he makes a very pretty picture. How did he become this? He was so strong and confident, three years ago, a stone-cold hearteater. And now he’s quavering in his seat when his husband asks him if he’d like the vegetable menu or the basic option, although of course they get one of each, which is by now tradition.

But the nervousness nipping at his ankles fades rapidly once the waiters bring them their first courses; Kihyun has been deprived of _actual _food for so long that just the barest mouthful has him blissful. Sabayon with oysters and caviar, it’s — not as good as it could be, he supposes, but it’ll do for now. Changkyun seems equally puzzled by his broccoli soup, something affecting rustic flair, and when they switch halfway through, Changkyun leans over the table and murmurs, “Is it just me, or is this not very good?”

“It’s not just you,” Kihyun says, immensely relieved at the solidarity. “Should we send it back?”

“Nah, let’s give them another chance,” Changkyun says, and Kihyun is willing enough to go along with that, and the plates are so small that they end up finishing their soups regardless. 

But the second courses aren’t much better — a vegetarian ceviche, a badly maligned foie gras — and by now Changkyun is smiling in that way he has, like he’s enjoying a joke he’s about to let Kihyun in on, and the waiters simply refuse to come their way to refill their wine glasses, to the point that Kihyun suggests they must be doing it on purpose and Changkyun dissolves into giggles, badly smothered by his bread roll. (“Of course it was all bullshit about the bread rolls,” Kihyun tells him flatly, stealing Changkyun’s away. “My family never even celebrated Thanksgiving.” Changkyun doesn’t seem too disappointed by the revelation, but he is by the loss of the bread, and getting a waiter to come with replacements is impossible, so all in all his dimples are outrageously on display and Kihyun can’t stop looking at him, can’t believe how easy on the eyes he is, after looking in all the wrong places all this time he can’t see enough of him.)

The third courses inspire no rapture. “To be perfectly honest,” Kihyun says, staring sadly at his lobster, “since that’s apparently what you want, I’m not enjoying this.”

“Dinner, or our marriage?” Changkyun says. He’s been making little remarks like that a lot, evidently finding them funny, but they always imbue Kihyun with a certain existential despair. 

Kihyun barely even dignifies that with a response and bottles the despair up more tightly. “Dinner,” he says. “I think I was so blinded by the Michelin stars and the prestige that I excused the mediocrity on our previous visits here, but now I see it.”

“No, so do I,” Changkyun says thoughtfully. He blinks around for a waiter. “But we still have two hours before the opera. What do you want to do instead?”

“Get bagels?” Kihyun suggests, and Changkyun lights up as though Kihyun had just proposed that they break into a zoo after hours — as though it’s something as improbable as it had seemed impossible, but when they’re together, nothing can be out of reach. Then Changkyun does something very rare, which has always dazzled Kihyun despite his best efforts to remained unmoved; it’s all in the tilt of his shoulders and his jaw, the determined set of his eyes, but he becomes _powerful, _suddenly looks capable of controlling his unfathomable wealth. It’s the equivalent of the final moment of a coronation, and waiters flock to him like moths to a flame. Why couldn’t he have done that sooner? But this Kihyun won’t call him on, he’s worried Changkyun will get self-conscious and never do it again. Changkyun signs the check, together they ignore the waiter’s sad attempts to get them to reconsider their early departure, and soon they’re on the street again, both in their trim little suits and with Changkyun in the bowtie Kihyun had done up for him.

It doesn’t take long for them to find a suitable replacement for their dinner plans. Changkyun goes for an everything bagel with gravlax and plain cream cheese; Kihyun’s choice is sesame, chive schmear, and smoked salmon. Cheap coffee as a complement. They sit, knees knocking together, at the counter, exchanging bagels every other bite, and Kihyun gets right back to his comfort zone, complaining about their experience at Per Se: “The knives weren’t even sharp! And my savoyard was _so _greasy. It’s an outrage that they’ve kept all three stars, that’s how you know it’s just political. Ugh. That’s the problem with so much haute cuisine these days, to say nothing of the Michelin Guide itself — they’re too focused on tradition, not at all on innovation or, God forbid, on what would _actually _be a good meal. Not that innovation for innovation’s sake is a good thing, either, but— why are you looking at me like that?”

Changkyun shrugs and takes a messy bite of his bagel. It cost four dollars, which Kihyun very distantly remembers as being an outrageous price for a bagel sandwich to be. “I really missed the way you talk,” he says lightly. “You sound like a real critic. Not in the ‘everyone’s a critic’ sense, but in the sense that… you know your shit. You’re offended by the right things, you’re pleased by the right things. It’s cool.”

“I’m glad you approve,” Kihyun mutters, but he feels _stupidly _happy about the compliment and knocks his knee against Changkyun’s underneath the Formica countertop. Now that they’re talking about this, now that he has been coaxed out of his lair at least somewhat, he hesitantly offers, “I did want to be a critic, when I was younger. Getting paid to ruin careers? Dream job.”

“I could make that happen,” Changkyun says and passes over his bagel.

Kihyun takes it, swapping his in return, but splutters. “What do you mean, you could make that happen? I’m not talking, like, a Yelp reviewer, I mean I wanted to be the next Roger Ebert—”

“Theatre, food, or film? Serious question,” Changkyun says. “If you want a job, and I’m _not _saying you need to have one, but if you want this to be your career, you know all I have to do is make some calls.” He raises his eyebrows at Kihyun and takes a gulp of his thin, gritty coffee, and Kihyun has to look away from him, he can’t handle seeing Changkyun so put-together in his thousand-dollar suit and bowtie, hair neatly brushed for a change, holding a cheap bagel and a chipped mug of instant coffee. All of a sudden he understands, now, why Changkyun takes the subway: slumming it makes the dear things in life seem that much dearer. None more dear than Changkyun himself. Kihyun can’t fucking believe how fond the absence made his heart grow. Instead of voicing any of this, he scoffs quietly, pushes a finger under Changkyun’s chin to remind him to chew with his mouth closed, and finishes off his own bagel. 

“I need to think about it,” he says, as though it’s casual. But already he’s making plans in his head, and strongly leaning towards food; he’s read about what it’s like to be a critic or a Michelin inspector, and he knows it’s a difficult and solitary life, but he’s sure he’d be able to pull a few strings in order to permit Changkyun to accompany him on all his restaurant reviewing expeditions. If not, maybe he can just have a highly influential blog. Maybe Wonho can give him some tips on social media management. After a brief delay, he identifies this feeling bubbling in his chest as excitement, and when he sneaks a glance at Changkyun, he finds him smiling, too, and wiping off his fingers and stacking up their baskets so they can go. “Where to now? We’ve still got, like, an hour.”

“The Met has a bar!” Changkyun recalls, and ten minutes later they’re sharing a bottle of sparkling rosé, and Changkyun, newly impatient, is fiddling with one end of his bowtie and Kihyun is threatening that if he undoes it, Kihyun will _not _fix it for him no matter how he begs, and the winter light catches Changkyun’s head just so and limns his hair with frost, and Kihyun is relieved to find that he can actually picture Changkyun going grey, now, when before that had been such a paradox. Kihyun will grey first, he’s sure of that, his own father had silvered at forty, and Kihyun wonders when Changkyun will follow. 

Christ, it’s _stupid _how soft he’s gotten — within the span of an hour he’s gone from fantasizing about a future career as America’s most powerful and feared restaurant critic with his boytoy by his side to imagining getting old with said boytoy — he can’t stand it. And although such thoughts might have caused him to lash out, before, to shove Changkyun away from him and seek to injure him in some significant way for fear of the thoughts only getting worse, now he contents himself with bullying Changkyun into finding them a program so they can read the plot of this fucking opera, since neither of them speaks a lick of Russian, and then they sit too close together with Changkyun’s leg cast over Kihyun’s lap while they go through the synopsis. Kihyun had done well with his choice of outfits for them — they’re certainly not underdressed, and although the suits don’t stand out too garishly, they’re certainly attracting a few appreciative looks, these two young-ish well-dressed men all wrapped up in each other. But too much PDA still makes Kihyun a little twitchy, and when the first chime sounds to indicate eight minutes to the start of the performance, Changkyun walks them up the grand red staircase to their private parterre box, Kihyun very much the dutiful trophy husband on his arm. 

He’s having fun, but by the time they’re sitting down, he’s already managed to complain about the fact that it’s not really _their _private box — Changkyun had just booked out all the seats — and the lack of intermission, to all of which Changkyun just smiles at him and says hey, he’ll see what he can do. “What are you going to do about the intermission?” Kihyun mutters, waiting until Changkyun pulls his chair out for him to sit down. “Bribe the conductor?”

“Pick a better opera,” Changkyun shrugs. He takes Kihyun’s hand instantly, instinctively, when he sits, and Kihyun lets him, not minding. The orchestra is tuning with a discordant sound, and Kihyun doesn’t disguise his reaction like he might have before, instead frowns at the screeching and focuses on the program in his other hand, even though they read the whole thing together not too long before. Changkyun leans against Kihyun’s shoulder to read it, too, and Kihyun permits him that as well, and they’re content to sit in mostly silence until the final call sounds, the lights dim, and the opera begins.

There is no overture. After a brief French horn intro, the soprano starts her aria, but Kihyun can’t focus on her voice when the stage is decorated to look like a gaudy hotel room, giving the impression of luxury without any of the actual trappings. He lets go of Changkyun’s fingers and places his own hand palm-up, waiting, and Changkyun fills it with the pair of opera glasses he’d dug up somewhere in the house. A different pair than the ones they’d shared on their Carnegie Hall date, way back when, but equally nice, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and engraved in pretty patterns, and Kihyun unfolds the handle and holds them up to his eyes to see the set. “It’s hideous,” he says under his breath.

“I don’t like it, either,” Changkyun replies immediately, an earnest confession, like he’d just been waiting for Kihyun to say it first.

Kihyun takes the lorgnette down and looks over at Changkyun. He’s looking at the stage, smiling like he’s in on a private joke, and Kihyun feels an ugly pull of jealousy before he realizes the private joke is shared with _him, _and then relaxes. The woman onstage is singing herself into a trance, begging the eponymous fiery angel to disappear, and she repeats it like a frenzied prayer, _leave me, leave me, leave me, _and Kihyun has already lost track of the plot but he thinks he understands the urgency in her tone, her obsession, her devotion, causing all else in her life to crumble. However, she’s disadvantaged by an awful costume and an even worse wig, and normally Kihyun does try to be quiet at shows, can’t stand it when people are whispering, but what’s the point in having a box all to themselves if he can’t even maintain a running commentary throughout the opera? He leans over to Changkyun, who tears his eyes away from the stage to blink at him. 

“Did the Met’s budget only enable them to buy costumes at Party City? They spent the rest on wallpaper?” Kihyun says once he’s sure he has Changkyun’s attention, and Changkyun snickers, then goes suddenly serious, laying his hand on Kihyun’s knee. Not at all the reaction Kihyun had hoped for, and he frowns at him in a pinched way, pulling his knee out of his hold. “What?”

“Only say it if you mean it,” Changkyun says, low and very nearly a reprimand. “Not just to make me laugh.”

Kihyun reddens immediately. “That’s _not _why—” But then Changkyun just _looks _at him, and he remembers his promise to be honest, and then he just shuts up, figuring Changkyun would rather Kihyun say nothing at all than lie. 

Who’d have known; an opera is much better enjoyed when Kihyun’s priority isn’t coming up with insults for every aspect of the production. However, Changkyun saying he would love it was wishful thinking at best and outright misleading at worst, because it’s absolutely _insane, _the director’s fault as much as Prokofiev’s, and the lack of intermission combined with the subject matter — a twisted, barely comprehensible tale of dark erotic power and religious fanaticism — leaves Kihyun feeling like he’s just been bludgeoned over the head by the time the company is taking its bows. Now he regrets just sitting there, muzzled for Changkyun’s sake, if _that _was the conclusion this story was going to come to. He looks to Changkyun, who seems similarly flummoxed by the last two and a half hours, and the audience around them is applauding riotously, but all Kihyun wants is to get out of there, for Changkyun to whisk him away back home, and he indicates as much with a tilt of his head. Changkyun, by now fluent in Kihyun’s language, maker of his own Rosetta Stone, stands, their hands find each other, and out they slip, before the final curtain even falls.

“Well?” Changkyun says, blinking in the brighter light of the stairwell. “What did you think?”

Kihyun hums, considering the question, and he’s amazed that by all standards, by his _own _standards, that was a lousy date; they didn’t enjoy their dinner, they had too much time to kill in-between, the opera wasn’t to either of their liking. There was a long commute, with another one yet to come — they might not be home before midnight. But despite all this, he knows he’s happy, he _feels _he’s happy, and there’s such a difference in knowing it and feeling it that it takes him quite a long moment to reply, watching their linked hands swinging between them as Changkyun guides them to the stairs. “I think,” Kihyun says, and Changkyun makes a bright noise to prompt him to continue, “we should have gone to _La Bohème.”_

Changkyun laughs, and he’s still smiling that big, toothy smile that makes him look ten years younger when they make it to the lobby and Kihyun sends him off to go retrieve their coats from the private members-only coat check. Kihyun did always like making him play errand boy, which is why he’d had Changkyun actually check the coats instead of merely hanging them up in the entryway of their box like they were probably supposed to have done, and he’s pleased when Changkyun returns and helps him into his coat. “Look,” Changkyun says, and hands Kihyun a small, glossy brochure, a little worn around the edges, not newly printed. “They gave me this. Are you interested? It could be fun.”

“Who is _they?” _Kihyun says, amused, but looks at the brochure as they begin to leave the opera house, beating the rush of other attendants heading out. It’s a bare-bones advertisement for something called the Metropolitan Opera Club, seemingly a circle-jerk of music appreciation and white-tie events, gala dinners, lectures, and, most appealingly, it’s invitation-only. Obnoxiously stuffy and dowdy, real old-money shit. Yes, he thinks he would quite like to be a part of this with Changkyun; this is exactly the kind of married couple he wishes for them to be. Acting casual, he shrugs and hands the brochure back to him, and Changkyun holds the door open for him, taking a moment to get his bearings before indicating the direction they need to walk in to get back on the train. “Sure, I suppose. If someone invited us, I wouldn’t say no.”

“Done,” Changkyun grins. “Since you asked, by the way, I actually _loved _that.”

“The opera? Of course you did,” Kihyun sighs. It’s freezing outside and he shivers, and Changkyun lets go of his hand — Kihyun huffs, disgruntled, but he was only doing so in order to put his arm around Kihyun’s frame instead, hugging him closer since he always runs so warm in comparison. “What did you like about it?”

Changkyun immediately launches into a rapturous monologue about the transgressive boundary-pushing elements of the production, as well as Prokofiev’s libretto and the overall connections to the symbolist movement, and Kihyun tunes him out after the first few sentences, too cold to care. If he becomes a critic, maybe Changkyun can become some sort of lowly arts columnist, and they can have a public rivalry. The thought is enough to entertain Kihyun all the way until they’re on their first train of the night, by which time Changkyun has run out of ways to wax poetic, and they’re back in their companionable silence, Kihyun now half-wrapped in Changkyun’s coat while they sway together with the motion of the subway car. In order to transfer to their Metro North train, they’ll have to go through Grand Central, the irony of which has escaped neither of them, but Kihyun will wait to feel anything until they’re actually there. 

They switch to a different subway line, and from there it’s three minutes to Grand Central, and now they really are overdressed, sticking out quite obviously amongst the other late-night passengers. Kihyun tries to imagine how they look from the outside here, he can see that people are looking at them, but the attention doesn’t even rankle; Changkyun’s outfit is more outlandish than Kihyun’s is, anyway. Kihyun has the passing thought that he looks forward to getting home and changing into sweatpants, then is disgusted by how _old _that means he’s gotten, and he’s frowning to himself as they exit the train and make their way through the tunnels of the station, seeking out the proper track. 

“Want to take a bath when we get home? I got some new salts you might enjoy,” Changkyun says, evidently thinking along similar lines, and Kihyun exhales a luxuriating breath. For all his obliviousness, sometimes Changkyun knows precisely what to say. Changkyun looks up from his phone — finding their train passes — to check Kihyun’s reaction, and then suddenly stills, and Kihyun does, too, confused.

“What?” Kihyun says. “No bath?”

“No,” Changkyun says, slow and a little hesitant, “no, that’s fine— sorry, I just thought I saw something.”

“Either say what it is or don’t. I’m not playing this game,” Kihyun says flatly, and that was the wrong reaction to have, Changkyun withdraws further. “Well?”

“You just— it’s really nothing,” Changkyun prefaces, “but for a second, you looked like— I don’t know. Something about your face. One of your tells, I guess.”

Christ, anything but fucking this. Kihyun pulls his arm out of Changkyun’s grip and stares at him, completely unimpressed. “What, that I’m lying? I wasn’t even _saying _anything.”

“I know, I know, which is why I said it was nothing,” Changkyun says. Are they seriously going to get in a fight twenty feet from where they first met? And Changkyun’s close observation, so familiar with Kihyun’s microexpressions, facial muscles he doesn’t even know how to control, that once made Kihyun squirm with the hot, pleasurable mortification of being known and understood so thoroughly, now hurts, far more than Kihyun expected it to. He’d been in a perfectly fine mood, glad at the prospect of getting lazy when they got home, and now it’s all ruined, because of a perceived_ tell. _Fucking Christ. “I know it’s not your fault. It was just a trick of the light.”

And now he’s trying to placate him, as though Kihyun is something so dangerous and unhinged that he might snap and change his mind about killing him here and now, and that pushes the knife further into the wound and Kihyun crosses his arms over his chest, standing barely out of Changkyun’s reach. He’d been having fun. But Changkyun, evidently, this whole time has been walking on eggshells, just waiting for Kihyun to slip up. “I’m not going to apologize when I didn’t do anything wrong,” he says. Hypocritical, sure, given how many times he’s made Changkyun do exactly that, but _still. _“It’s unreasonable to ask me to be responsible for how you perceive me.”

“Kihyun, that’s what I’m saying,” Changkyun says. Kihyun refuses to look at him when Changkyun uses that tone of voice, somehow simultaneously patient and exasperated, so entreating. “I did a lot of emotional work while you were away—” That’s the euphemism they’ve been using; like Kihyun was just on a weekend trip, nothing more. “—but I still have plenty left to do. That’s not your burden to bear. I know you love me, I believe that you don’t want to lie to me anymore. But sometimes I still get nervous. I can’t help it, I’m working on it. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t love you, it just means—”

“You don’t trust me,” Kihyun completes bitterly.

Changkyun regards him, clear-eyed and solemn. “I don’t,” he says. “But I want you anyway.”

It’s precisely the right thing to say. Kihyun can’t help but recall the analogy of the tiger, and despite wanting to stay mad at him, he’s melting, and Changkyun can tell it, too, leaning across the distance between them to press a kiss to his cheek. “You’re such a freak,” Kihyun says, meaning it like a reprimand, but it comes out sounding nauseatingly fond. Changkyun shrugs, unashamed, kisses him again, and since Kihyun has permitted him re-entry, he takes loose hold of his arm and nudges them in the direction of track 27. 

Kihyun doesn’t know what to do with the way he’d just been feeling, with the way he feels now, so as he walks along by Changkyun’s side, he squeezes his arm more tightly and accuses, “I bet you know my face better than any other person on this planet. Minhyuk and I have a running joke that he wouldn’t be able to pick me out of a police lineup—” He trips over his own words and loses the breath to finish. The weight of what he’s done, to _everyone _who matters to him, hits him all at once, and he knows he can never tell Minhyuk the full truth, he shouldn’t even have told Wonho as much as he did but if he lost Minhyuk’s good regard he would truly never forgive himself, and this secret, his terrible secret, must remain locked away forever — if he even made teasing reference to only marrying Changkyun to kill him for his money, Minhyuk knows Kihyun too well, he’d _immediately _guess that it was true, and all would be lost. No good deed goes unpunished; it doesn’t matter that Kihyun hadn’t seen the plan through, just having thought it up would be enough to damn him. Only Kihyun can fully know. And Changkyun, too, he supposes, Changkyun knows already and doesn’t hate him yet, and now Changkyun is looking at him as they take their places on the track, waiting for the train to roll in and take them home.

“That’s because nobody knows you like I know you,” Changkyun says. It is _impossible,_ the way he keeps saying these crazy, sexy things when Kihyun is trying to lighten the mood or distract himself from his own self-flagellation, and God, if that doesn’t turn Kihyun on so fast it makes him dizzy, leaning in for a kiss right there in front of everyone.

Because it’s true, of course it is, no one else even comes close. _You and me against the world, _Kihyun thinks, kissing Changkyun harder, and looks forward to the day he’s brave enough to say it out loud. Changkyun is at once his prisoner and jailer, equally trapped as locking Kihyun up and throwing away the key, and it’s been a _wonderful _date, Kihyun can’t believe how much fun he had, and what could possibly be sweeter than Changkyun seeing the whole monstrous truth of him and loving him anyway? Kihyun grabs Changkyun’s hands and puts them on his own hips, urges Changkyun to kiss him deeper, and they stop for a scant minute when the train arrives so they can find their way to their seats, but then Kihyun finds himself either pulled into Changkyun’s lap or clambering in willingly, he can’t tell which is closer to the truth and it honestly doesn’t even matter, because the result is the same — they’re all entangled, Changkyun’s tongue down Kihyun’s throat and Kihyun’s hands tight on either side of Changkyun’s neck, and Kihyun tugs hard to undo Changkyun’s bowtie and Changkyun ruins Kihyun’s carefully coiffed hair in return, and Kihyun thinks he might understand why Changkyun has put such an emphasis on honesty, going forward — it might just be a glorious thing, to have full confidence in someone’s sincerity, to know that what he sees is what he gets forevermore.

It’s not a short journey that awaits them, nearly 45 minutes, and they’re not alone in the train car, but for once, Kihyun couldn’t care less. If this really is their coming-out, they may as well make a fucking splash. He loves the way Changkyun kisses him, he always has, and Changkyun isn’t quite hard but he’s certainly interested — Kihyun draws the line at outright public sex, of course, but a little heavy petting could be within the realm of permissibility. Changkyun tugs at the hem of Kihyun’s shirt to untuck it from his trousers, fitting his hot fingers over the ridge of his hips, and Kihyun sighs into his mouth, breaks the kiss to lean down and kiss his neck, where he still smells so alive, he finally learned how to use cologne the right way. Kihyun licks him there, over his pulse, sucks in a soft red mark, nibbles at his silver earring, breathes hot against the whorl where his hair grows in neatly-kept sideburns, wishes they were one, sharing the same body, so he would never misunderstand Changkyun again. For now, he kisses Changkyun, and Changkyun kisses him, Kihyun side-saddle in his lap and their arms making a beautiful cage around each other. 

If this is how they pass the time, then Kihyun might not even mind taking the train in and out of the city, going forward. He tries to think of a way to tell Changkyun that without sounding totally desperate, but words aren’t quite sticking in his mind, he keeps getting distracted by the way Changkyun laps at his tongue. They’re so tangled together, inextricably entwined, with Changkyun’s fingers pressing tightly to Kihyun’s waist and Kihyun’s arms wound about his shoulders, and Kihyun’s whole body is buzzing slightly even though he’d had two glasses of wine at absolute most — he’s just drunk on the good company, on how Changkyun is kissing him, and everything else completely fades away.

But only temporarily; after some amount of time has passed, he’s not quite sure how much, their oasis is revealed as a mirage when someone, presumably either a conductor or one of the other passengers, coughs very pointedly, right above them. Kihyun ignores the cough on purpose and tilts his head to the other side to let his and Changkyun’s tongues run together, and then comes the cough again, and finally a weary, “Excuse me?”

At this point, Kihyun expects Changkyun to pull away and make a few apologies, but he does no such thing — instead, he hitches Kihyun closer in his lap and pulls at his lower lip with his teeth. Kihyun hums an amused sound, and Changkyun hums back, and Kihyun can taste that he’s smiling. 

The interloper tries again. “Excuse me,” he says, no longer sounding polite. “Hello? I know you can hear me. This is inappropriate behavior, and I would appreciate it if you stopped.”

“I would appreciate it if you fucked off,” Kihyun mumbles very quietly into Changkyun’s mouth and Changkyun grins wider, chases after Kihyun’s mouth for another biting kiss. It’s interesting that Changkyun hasn’t reacted at all yet; is he waiting for Kihyun to go first? That’s almost cute. Kihyun won’t if Changkyun doesn’t, though, and he just sighs, pressing into smaller brushed kisses, just exploring Changkyun’s kittenish mouth, the soft curves of him, so frail despite his affected confidence. Kihyun worries about him so much, still, even though he’s with him all day long he’s still worried, and he kisses him to show it, until he nearly forgets that some annoyed businessman is right above them, trying to suppress their God-given right to brag about their happiness.

But said businessman hasn’t forgotten, and this time he’s mad: “This is a first-class compartment, you know. There are certain standards for how we’re all meant to act. Do you have any idea how much I paid for this train pass?”

And _that _makes Changkyun pull away. Kihyun tucks into his shoulder, looking resentfully up at the intruder, and Changkyun, with his lips all wet from kissing and one hand slipping between Kihyun’s thighs, says, “Do you have any idea how much I paid for _him?”_

Kihyun goes brilliantly scarlet. As was probably Changkyun’s intention, that makes Kihyun sound like a very expensive hooker. He supposes he looks like one, in his rumpled suit with his hair a mess as he preens on Changkyun’s lap, and Changkyun is so cool, so rich-bitch confident, and the businessman gets very flustered and has no idea what to do with that, his mouth opening and closing dumbly. “Well— at least— try and pull yourselves together,” he finally manages, then flees back to his seat. And isn’t Changkyun right? He paid for the privilege of mutual carte blanche with a human life, and Kihyun pounces on him as much as he can while already in his arms, pinning him back against the seat and kissing him hard. 

Changkyun is very pleased with himself, Kihyun can taste it in his mouth, and in the past that might have made Kihyun turn to the sadistic, beat that smugness out of him, but now he doesn’t mind. He’s earned a bit of smug. Kihyun is delirious with good fortune, and he sucks on Changkyun’s lower lip for a long, indulgent moment, then breathes, “I want—”

“What do you want, baby?” Changkyun encourages, his voice is so low, Kihyun shudders, rubs his fingers over the nape of Changkyun’s neck and kisses him, and when his lips move to speak an answer, he expects to hear himself say something about how he wants to fold Changkyun in half and wreck him, but instead—

“I want you to meet my parents,” he says, and the kiss stops, and he’s struggling to breathe. Can’t meet Changkyun’s eyes again, he has to press their foreheads together and gasp, quietly. “I want them to see how much you love me. How loved I am by you. What I have. Not the house, not the cars, just— you.”

God, he hopes Changkyun doesn’t laugh at him. But of course Changkyun isn’t even smiling, and when Kihyun checks, his dark eyes are serious and awed. “It would be my honor,” Changkyun says, still low, now tender. “Kihyun, it means the world to me that—”

“Shut up, we don’t need to talk about it right this second,” Kihyun interrupts hastily and kisses him by way of a distraction, and Changkyun is happy enough to melt into it, not as combative as he seems. In another minute all unfamiliar emotion has vanished into the background where it belongs, and they’re kissing with abandon, Kihyun playing with Changkyun’s hair and Changkyun dragging his palm up and down Kihyun’s thigh. 

Kihyun is almost sorry when the train begins to slow, but that means they’re that much closer to home, and Changkyun is starting to tip into impatience, too, more eager to be nipped when Kihyun kisses him, his breath a little heavier, and Kihyun slips out of his lap and, amazed at his own impertinence, blows a kiss to the disgruntled businessman (now pretending to hide behind a newspaper) like some kind of cheap floozy before, giggling, Changkyun holds his coat while Kihyun puts it on and they run out of the train and into the station.

Kihyun knew Changkyun loved it when Kihyun acted mean to strangers — he just hadn’t known he loved it _this _much. He can barely keep Changkyun off him when they’re tracking down the car in the lot, Changkyun is trying to kiss his neck while Kihyun unlocks the door, and Kihyun laughs and shoves him off and sternly tells him, “We’re almost home. You can wait that long, can’t you?”

Changkyun whines, but it’s all in vain — Kihyun pushes him towards the driver’s seat with strict instructions to behave, and now he’s starting to get it, slipping so easily back into that role, and part of Kihyun had feared that before, he’d only been going along with their sexual dynamic because Kihyun had wanted it that way, but now it’s clear that the folie à deux runs deep, far deeper than imagined. It’s a burden off Kihyun’s shoulders that he didn’t even know he was carrying, and he’d be pleased with himself for clocking Changkyun so early in their relationship if he weren’t simultaneously resentful of all the time he wasted by insisting that Changkyun was a virgin or pretending to not be interested. They can make up for that lost time now, though, and it’s a quiet and tension-filled drive back to the house, Kihyun’s hand curled around Changkyun’s thigh and Changkyun’s cheeks a pretty pink. Kihyun runs his thumb up Changkyun’s inseam and the squeak Changkyun emits in response is reward enough — Kihyun, satisfied, stills his hand, and Changkyun pulls them into the garage and goes around to open the door for Kihyun.

It’s warm inside and most of the lights are off, so it’s dusky and a little sinister, just how Kihyun likes it. With the garage door closing behind them, he pulls Changkyun in by the hips, kisses him against the entryway wall, doubts they’ll even make it to the bedroom. Now Changkyun is hard — his self-control is remarkable — and he moans so sweetly at the pressure Kihyun gives him, not resisting in the slightest when Kihyun tugs him into the living room and pushes him down to his knees. 

“You say that I’m the tiger,” Kihyun says, and his hand shakes when he grabs Changkyun’s hair and pulls his head back. “That I’m insatiate, the one who came home for lack of better cock. But look at you. All you want is to be tamed.”

Changkyun’s eyes are slipping closed. He turns his head to nuzzle into Kihyun’s palm, his breath coming fast and shallow, now, always so fucking eager to please. He kneels like he was made for nothing but this, like he’s been waiting for it all night — and Kihyun understands, because he was waiting for it, too. He presses his thumb to Changkyun’s lower lip and Changkyun’s mouth falls open, so Kihyun forces it open wider, skin to his teeth, and drinks in the sight of him, face upturned, lips kiss-slick, delicate eyelashes dark and downcast, all Kihyun’s to play with, ravish, treasure. Kihyun takes his hand away and Changkyun makes an unhappy noise, and Kihyun’s instinct is to relent and give it back, but he resists, instead starts to undo his belt, and he can see the shudder that runs down Changkyun’s spine at the metallic click — he’s practically drooling for it, and his eyes open and Kihyun can’t look away.

“Tell me,” Kihyun says, “if you want me to stop.”

Changkyun swallows. He moves forward on his knees, and his hands come up as if in prayer, helping Kihyun with his belt. Kihyun stands aloof and anodyne but inside, he’s alive, and Changkyun presses his face into the skin at Kihyun’s iliac furrow, breathing, wet. Kihyun puts his hand back in Changkyun’s hair, pressing in, and the pulse beating where Kihyun curls his fingers to his neck is hardly even heightened. He’s calm, Changkyun. He knows exactly what to do. And he kisses Kihyun’s bare hip, and Kihyun can feel by the curve of his mouth that he is smiling.

“Of course,” Changkyun says. “But why would I ever want you to?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/paratazxis) (+ tip jar link therein) (and pls use #FoolproofAO3 !!), [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/paratazxis), [official playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/12MLmAfM9PhFB63N7EWMww?si=yQVn9E5ZR_-1vJVLkdfFFg), [More Fun playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4uy2Cl1pvB2ebqD4mUEJ75?si=26jS0Ry5SmyqOP3TqGegmQ)
> 
> small coda/epilogue next week, may 1
> 
> thank you for reading this far!


	10. some time later

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A morning like any other; wish fulfillment; honesty.

_some time later_

Kihyun wakes up with the alarm, and though the sound is obnoxious, he finds himself unable to move to turn it off. It’s Changkyun’s alarm, anyway, their phones use different chimes, and in Kihyun’s tight hold Changkyun begins to stir and reach across to the nightstand, and the room is quiet again in a moment. 

Kihyun had been having a nice dream. Now the details escape him the more and more he tries to reach for them. Changkyun had been there, carefree, which is not dissimilar to reality, and Kihyun stretches out his legs and lets his fingers loosen on Changkyun’s arm — they’ve stiffened in his sleep, and the joints pop with the release. “Five more minutes,” he mumbles, and Changkyun kisses into Kihyun’s hair and sighs, apologetically.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” he says. “Will you sleep some more?”

Maybe, maybe not. It’s hard for Kihyun to sleep in, he lacks Changkyun’s indulgent sensibilities. In vain, he tries to keep Changkyun in bed, hoping the siren song of his warm embrace will be enough, but Changkyun escapes his clutches, kisses him on the tip of the nose, and slips out. Kihyun pretends to be unbothered, half-asleep again already, but he’s watching Changkyun through one cracked eye as Changkyun stretches his arms over his head, his bird’s-nest hair, and walks on clumsy morning feet to the bathroom. The tap turns on, Kihyun can picture Changkyun washing his face with cold water, and then there’s the characteristic fizz of Changkyun spritzing serum onto his hairbrush to make himself look something near presentable. Kihyun supposes he can’t complain too much about this meeting when he himself had been the one to push for it — it’s been a while since you last looked at the will in detail, he’d said, things have changed since then. And Changkyun doesn’t even mind that Kihyun is still repugnantly jealous over absolutely nothing all these years later, and agrees that the art gallery never should have been in his will in the first place, so now it’s up to him to rectify that grave miscalculation. Kihyun hears the click of clothing hangers in the closet, and as he’s working his way through Changkyun’s thought processes when he picks out what to wear, he somehow ends up drifting off again, stretched on the diagonal between Changkyun’s side of the bed and his own. 

“Kihyun,” Changkyun says, soft so as not to rouse him if he’d managed to fall back asleep. “I’m heading out. See you soon.”

It takes Kihyun, lost somewhere between consciousness and slumber, a good few seconds to process what Changkyun had said, but when he finally gets there, his eyelashes pull up and he blinks to see Changkyun, dressed and tidy, bending over the side of the bed to talk to him. “Okay,” he yawns. “Bye.”

Changkyun leans down to kiss him on the cheek, then seemingly enjoys the warmth that sleep so often imbues Kihyun with and kisses him again, as reluctant to leave as Kihyun is to let him go. “Want me to bring you back some breakfast?”

“Sure,” Kihyun says. “You driving?”

“If I’m bringing breakfast back, suppose I’d better,” Changkyun smiles, and Kihyun nods, the motion of which draws Changkyun’s lips over his jaw again. “Eleven Madison Park or Balthazar?”

Kihyun considers it, and Changkyun keeps kissing him, his cheek, his nose, his eyelids, one after the other. Finally, his lips, and Kihyun’s voice is hoarse and airy from sleep but he decides, “Balthazar.”

“You got it,” Changkyun says.

Kihyun gauges that conversation as having run its course. Maybe he will sleep more, it’s looking likely. He turns away from Changkyun to roll over onto his front, nestling into the pillows, and sighs once he’s settled. But Changkyun doesn’t want to leave well enough alone, and he feels the pressure on the mattress as Changkyun, one knee on the edge, bows to kiss the side of Kihyun’s neck. Kihyun’s skin prickles, and he exhales quietly, and at Changkyun’s gentle urging, his big palms on his shoulders, he moves so he’s on his back and Changkyun can kiss him further. “If you don’t want to go, then don’t,” Kihyun murmurs, a very lazy hand coming up to touch Changkyun’s nape. “She’ll understand.”

“Come on, I shouldn’t stand Tamsin up,” Changkyun says regretfully, and Kihyun agrees with him but kisses him back anyway. The prospect of further sleep now seems characteristically distant, each second they spend talking and kissing is one that brings Kihyun more into his usual self, not this drowsy, pliant creature, and now that he’s more alert, he does resent many aspects of this meeting — the fact that so many near-strangers were in Changkyun’s will at all being the most egregious offense, but also the drive to Manhattan, not everyone is as careful on the roads as Kihyun is with Changkyun in the car, then the half-hour he’ll spend with Tamsin sharing reminiscences of a life that predates Kihyun, and the waiters at Balthazar who might leave Changkyun waiting for his take-out, utterly unconcerned with the husband Changkyun is expected to rush home to. No, he won’t go back to sleep now, but he might just stay in bed and wait for Changkyun’s return, for Changkyun to come into his arms with no intention of leaving, and tomorrow they can both go for Kihyun’s mandatory third visit to a Brooklyn lunch place called the Four Horsemen, and next week they’re expecting guests up on Canandaigua Lake, and the week after that, off they jet to Seoul to see Changkyun’s ancestral home, which now belongs to Kihyun, too. But Kihyun knows that will be a difficult visit for the both of them — constant reminders to Kihyun that Changkyun was whole, in a way, before him, and Changkyun will struggle to reconcile past with present, to decide whether he should attend to his husband or catch up with long-lost acquaintances and relatives, all of whom have tiny little parts of Changkyun that Kihyun hasn’t gotten to yet, memories or inside jokes or secrets, a jewelry box kept under lock and key, Kihyun digging in with greedy fingers when the lid is lifted. It’s a constant struggle, wanting to boast about Changkyun versus wanting to hoard him for Kihyun’s own purposes, but Kihyun is dealing with his insecurity, and his therapist even thinks he’s making excellent progress; her approval means a lot, but Kihyun can derive his own validation from within himself, now. He knows that Changkyun is a homing creature at heart — he may step away, but sure as the tide, he’ll come back in. Kihyun knows this, because he’s exactly the same way. 

“Fine,” Kihyun sighs, turns his face to the side, out of temptation’s reach. “Go. Don’t waste time.”

Changkyun settles for one final kiss, then straightens. “I’ll call you when I’m heading back, just in case there’s anything else you want,” he says. “Bye. I love you.”

Kihyun hums, lets the words sink in. He’d shut his eyes, but when he doesn’t hear Changkyun’s footsteps on the carpet, he opens them again and raises inquisitive eyebrows — Changkyun is just standing there, watching him. “Aren’t you late already?” Kihyun prompts.

Changkyun shrugs one shoulder; he’s in no real hurry. “Say it back.”

Kihyun’s expression goes nonplussed. This is Changkyun’s new game — he likes Kihyun’s confessions. “I hate everyone who’s ever looked at you,” Kihyun says.

It makes Changkyun smile, irrepressible, but he shakes his head: not good enough. “Say it properly, Kihyun,” he says. “I love you. Tell me you love me, too.”

Kihyun looks him in the eyes and gives him what he wants.

_the end_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i can't thank you enough for making it this far, with me and with them. i would also like to thank hyb, maddie, ellie, roux, and katya for all the emotional and intellectual support and being with the story from beginning to end, and i can't even express how amazing it has been for me to read everyone's comments and questions! it has meant the absolute world. i truly hope you all enjoyed this story even half as much as i enjoyed writing it, and i already miss it terribly. i literally cannot believe i've been working on this for more than a year (feb 21 2019 -> april 7 2020) and now it's over. my life is so empty now ouch. thank you to everyone else who's seen this story grow, and seriously, thank you so much for reading!!! it was always the best part of my month, updating and then getting to check out all of your wonderful comments and theories and speculations and seeing you guys interact with each other on here and on twt, thank you all from the bottom of my very full heart!
> 
> if you have any questions at all about what the future holds for changki, please dont hesitate to ask in the comments or on my twitter or cc (i, like kihyun, have no more secrets and can reveal anything youre curious about znkjfbfkjsbd), but i can tell yall right now that in a few years they get a little whippet dog named desdemon and spoil him ROTTEN
> 
> please let me know what you thought by leaving a comment down below or coming to chat: [twitter](https://twitter.com/paratazxis), [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/paratazxis)
> 
> thank you so much again! see you guys next time!


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